‘My privacy is gone’: Brian Cox on Succession’s toll, spurning Game of Thrones – and his new role as Bach
Brian Cox has never been one to mince his words and he clearly isn’t going to start now, as we meet during a break from rehearsals for a new play about Johann Sebastian Bach. “I was not a Bach fanatic,” he says of the baroque German composer. “I mean, all that jiggly-jiggly stuff.” What’s more, he has actually played Bach once before, back in the 1980s, in a TV film. “It was, shall we say, a bit dry.”
But having recently finished in a role that has made him quite possibly the world’s biggest TV star – the fiendish patriarch and merciless media mogul Logan Roy in Succession – Cox was keen to get his feet back on a stage. “I’m a glutton for terrible punishment,” he says. “I’m at a certain age now and I just wanted to know if I could still learn lines. And it has been difficult because we’ve done it in such a short period, with a play we are constantly changing, constantly cutting.”
The Score, by Oliver Cotton, investigates a particular moment in Bach’s life when – in his 60s, with 20 industrious years as director of church music and some sublime masses behind him – he was summoned from his home in Leipzig to the court of the Prussian king, Frederick the Great. His task? To improvise a fugue around a musical theme composed by the king himself.
The devout composer is taken aback by this brutal monarch, who shows no Christian concern about the violence his demobbed soldiers are unleashing on his citizens, yet is still capable of writing a haunting piece of music. So begins an inquiry into the origins of inspiration. “Bach describes it as this tiny, blurred, grey moment,” says Cox. “It’s the moment between want and action. When you want to do something and then you do it, what is it that you do?”
It’s an inquiry to which Cox himself has given much thought over the years. “I completely identify, because so much of what you do, you don’t know what you’re doing. But you know you’re driven by something.” Bach assumed it was divine inspiration. “I’m a humanist,” says Cox. “I feel we don’t acknowledge our own humanity nearly enough, because we’re so busy surrounding ourselves with belief systems, when none of them – Islam, Catholicism, Judaism or any other religion – clarify anything. They just make things more complicated.”
These rehearsals are taking place in a church in west London that smells strongly of incense. In the vestibule outside, congregants are busy arranging huge vases of flowers. Cox, who was brought up a Catholic, waves a hand towards the altar and says: “Really, the belief is in who we are, what we do, what we can do, what our possibility is, and how we can be integrated with one another. That’s what takes place in the church, and in the theatre, when people come together. There’s something that happens to them as a community. It is what Hamlet says: holding a mirror up to nature, showing people what our life is.”
This is not a thought one could imagine Logan Roy pursuing for long without arriving at one of his infamous “Fuck offs”. Cox gave such a towering performance in Succession that it is a surprise to find how small he is in person. He makes this point himself, joking that he recently played the famously tall US president Lyndon B Johnson on Broadway – and at 5ft 8in must be the smallest LBJ on record.
The death of Roy in the fourth series of Succession was the TV event of the year (at least until the finale a few weeks later). It was so discreetly done, in the bathroom of his PJ (private jet), that some fans wondered if he was really dead. If his funeral brought confirmation, it also gave them an unexpected treat. As the clans gathered in the church, a stranger slipped into the pew for Roy’s wives and mistresses.
It didn’t take long for social media to start humming with the intelligence that the actor was Nicole Ansari-Cox, the actor’s wife in real life. The couple didn’t overlap on set. “I wasn’t there because I was dead,” Cox deadpans. They do rather better in The Score, in which she plays Bach’s second wife, Anna, who was mother to 13 of his 20 children. The casting was the idea of director Trevor Nunn, who had cast them together before, in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play Rock’n’Roll.
Such opportunities are the upside of a new celebrity that has left Cox with profoundly mixed feelings. It