Brian Cox spares no one — not even himself
When thinking about Brian Cox, it’s hard not to call up the two-word Anglo-Saxon phrase he so punctually spouts on
HBO’s “Succession.” (The second word is “off.”) Hard, too, not to hear that phrase rumbling beneath the lines of Cox’s piquant, digressive memoir, “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” which tracks his journey from embattled workingclass lad in Dundee, Scotland, to, at age 75, improbable pop-culture icon — and which forfeits none of the spiky candor that got him there.
Cox is the product of a dislocated clan of mixed Irish and Scottish ancestry, “besieged by the forces of tribalism and the Catholic faith.” The sudden death of his father, a grocer, when Cox was 8 set his family on “the mousewheel of poverty.” With a mother who was both mentally ill and regularly absent, Cox ended up bouncing between relations, an underfed latchkey kid with no stable home life.
In that moment came his calling, as unexpected for “a flabby, pimply youth in unwashed clothes” as it was unwavering. “I don’t believe that you have to live through tragedy in order to portray it, but it does help clarify things for you, and for me it all added up to what felt like a formidable singleness of purpose,” he explains. “That was my superpower. It set me on my path.”
He took a jack-of-alltrades job at the Dundee Repertory Theatre, then a slot at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Welding his proletarian energy to classical training, he staked out a claim as one of English theater’s most in-demand leading men, scoring particular triumphs as Macbeth and Titus Andronicus. There he might have remained, quietly totting up his honors and curtain calls, but in the mid-1980s, he set his sights on Hollywood.
“What I was influenced by were the wonderful character actors from the 1930s and 1940s. The ones who had a way of creating an arc for themselves, no matter how big or small their role.” To see that process in action, check out Michael Mann’s “Manhunter” (1986), where Cox has just a few minutes of screen time to put across a serial killer named Hannibal Lecter (or Lecktor, as it was then spelled). This isn’t the bulging-eyed psychopath later immortalized by Anthony Hopkins but a calmly inflected, almost banal fellow with insanity tucked lightly up his sleeve. Indeed, if there’s any thread that ties together Cox’s crowded oeuvre – more than 230 acting credits, ranging from Trotsky to Churchill to Agamemnon – it’s that sense of a secret knowledge, a barely cloaked aggression, thrumming beneath his roughened skin.
No wonder the producers of “Succession” tapped him for their antihero, Logan Roy, a right-wing media mogul who refuses the King Lear role assigned to him and spins like a dime between rageful silence and rageful noise. Cox admits that “it can be almost distressingly easy to put on my Logan Roy skin,” in part because “we’re both disappointed in how the human experiment has turned out. We share a certain disgust.”
And, like Logan, he doesn’t mind venting a bit. Quentin Tarantino: “Plot mechanics in place of depth. Style where there should be substance.” Steven Seagal: “Suffers from that Donald Trump syndrome of thinking himself far more capable and talented than he actually is.” Ian McKellen: “A master at what I’d call ‘frontfoot’ acting.” Michael
Caine: “Being an institution will always beat having range.” Johnny Depp: “So overblown, so overrated.” Cox has little use for Method excess (though he’s forbearing with the selfflagellations of Jeremy Strong, who plays one of his sons on “Succession”), and don’t get him started on directors with their useless notes or actors who decide to rewrite their lines. Or actors in general, who are “whores for praise, locked into approbation, capable of killing our offspring in return for validation and living only for applause, both literally and figuratively.”
Cox very much includes himself in that description and cops as well to being an unfaithful husband, a “fairly crappy father” and “a little bit of a diva.” Perhaps it is this substrate of self-knowledge that most clearly separates him from the deeply unintrospective fellow he inhabits on HBO. Well, that and his New York state medical marijuana card and the unstinting devotion to his own craft.