THE LIFE OF BRIAN COX
After his Succession triumph, actor finally has the luxury of saying no
Watch Brian Cox walk through the door and you instinctively brace. Because what you see striding toward you is Logan Roy, the volcanic media mogul at the heart of HBO's megahit Succession — a measure of how brilliantly Cox defined that role.
Cox, far more amiable than his splenetic television persona (if similarly outspoken and fond of an expletive), finds all this wryly amusing.
“It's kind of ironic that the whole thing was a huge satire on entitlement, and yet people love Logan Roy,” he says, grinning. “And you go, `He's not particularly lovable. I mean, I'm glad you love him, in one sense, because I'm glad you see that he's a human being. But at the same time what he represents is not very nice.'”
For an actor who has worked successfully on stage and screen for six decades, given landmark performances of King Lear and Titus Andronicus, being pitched into the celebrity stratosphere at 77 is both a blessing and a curse. He grumbles, mildly, about the loss of anonymity but adds that increased fame has given him the option to say no.
This month finds him grappling with another wildly dysfunctional family. He's in mid-rehearsal for a West End staging of Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill's harrowing 1941 masterpiece about a family tearing itself apart.
Cox plays James Tyrone, an actor whose family is disintegrating around him: his wife is sinking into morphine addiction; one son has tuberculosis, and the other is a drunk. It's unspeakably bleak, yet what makes it, for so many, the great American play is the love that courses through it.
Cox speaks passionately about the depths and demands of the piece: “You have to have enormous patience to do it ... You can't jump the gun on it.”
Tyrone is a man exposed as a child to loss and poverty, who's found his road in acting. For Cox, that's close to home.
Growing up in Dundee, eastern Scotland, he lost his father, suddenly, when he was eight, and his mother suffered a series of breakdowns. They were left “dirt poor.”
In his 2021 autobiography Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, he describes being sent out to the chip shop for scraps of batter. “There's so much in the play that crosses over with my own life. I find it exceedingly painful.”
At 14, he got a job in Dundee Rep, sweeping the stage and running errands. That was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with drama.
“My favourite line (in Long Day's Journey) is when Tyrone says, `I loved Shakespeare, I would have acted in any of his plays for nothing, for the joy of being alive in his great poetry.' It's so moving to me. It says it all. That's what we do when we work with great playwrights. We give ourselves over to the notion of something that is beyond us.”
Unlike Tyrone, who's sold out and sticking with one lucrative role, Cox has made an effort to keep moving, taking projects ranging from the classics and new drama to blockbusters, refusing to “stay too long at the fair.”
“I do walk across the stage some days and think, ` What are you doing? Why are you doing this?' I don't even understand it myself ... But you can't live on past glories. You've got to move on. That's the thing about the theatre. You've got to be in the present.”
Cox's restless drive comes pinging off the pages of Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. It's a joy of a memoir: funny, frank, furious and indiscreet. He can be withering about some directors — a view he repeats in our conversation (“A lot of directors are nuisances”) — and about “method acting” (“I don't hold with it”).
But it's also packed full of insights about the craft of drama.
And, he's tough on himself. He talks movingly about the loss of his father and about his own shortcomings as a parent. Several recent roles have been troubled patriarchs: men struggling to reconcile parenthood with ambition, ethics with success.
“Logan is one of the most misunderstood characters I've ever played. All he wanted was to find, within his own family, a successor. And he was crude, he was rude, he moved further and further to the right. But I don't think he started that way. If we look at his backstory, he had a sister that died of polio, so there's a sort of guilt thing in him that we never talk about in the show. But that's what drives him on; that's his engine.”
Interviewing Cox is something of a rodeo experience — his mind leaps from subject to subject, leaving questions hanging and opinions bubbling in the air. He rails against conceptual theatre and laments the reversals in social mobility, pointing out that he, as a working-class teenager, was able to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where, he says, “they taught me how to think.” Conversation ranges from Gaza to Russia to Dragons' Den, to politics (“I'm a socialist”) and to religion, about which he is skeptical.
“I think humanity has ignored its potential. And that's why the patriarchy has failed, miserably, and we have to move to a matriarchy. We really have to. It's the only future that we've got.”
He's set to direct a feature film in Scotland. So what does he do to relax?
“I relax in my work. And I watch a lot of films. I love the job, so I watch fellow actors. It's about learning. It's about finding stuff out. And that's what feeds me.
“And then sometimes you think, ` What the f---? Stop it. Behave yourself. Get a proper job.'” He laughs. “There's still time to get a proper job ...”