Brian Cox on Succession’s surprising legacy and why he would have re-written the ending
The Scottish actor talks marriage, losing his anonymity and how he’s still asked to repeat Logan Roy’s most famous catchphrase.
The Scottish actor talks marriage, losing his anonymity and how he’s still asked to repeat Logan Roy’s most famous catchphrase.
Scottish actor Brian Cox is best known for his roles as Logan Roy in Succession and Agamemnon in Troy. He has received numerous awards, including a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe.
He spoke to Saga Magazine about his life, marriage, politics and his famous character. You can read the full interview in our March edition in print or on our app.
The show made the 78-year-old Dundee-born actor a superstar.
“Logan Roy has made a lot of difference to my life and not altogether pleasantly sometimes,” he revealed.
“I’ve lost my anonymity, which I prided myself on. I was one of those actors who people know they know but are not sure what they’ve seen you in.
“Now with Logan Roy, everyone knows me, they come up in the street and want me to tell them to f*** off.
“Rosanna Arquette invited me to her house where Ronan Farrow was giving a talk on his book. It was really interesting, and all these intense Hollywood women were sitting around him going, ‘Oh yes’.
“He finished and there was a huge round of applause. I was standing at the back watching. Then all those women turned around, saw me and went: ‘Can you tell us to f*** off?’
“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is crazy.’ I said, ‘This is [post] #MeToo and you’re asking a white dinosaur to tell you to f*** off? Has anything penetrated through to you ladies? Clearly not!’”
Viewers loved to loathe Logan and were shocked when he died suddenly on a plane just three episodes into the final series. Could he return?
“No,” says Cox. “It’s done. I don’t think there will be any specials. When everybody said, ‘It’s terrible, why are they killing you off?’, I said, ‘It’s called Succession’.
“I did feel they killed me off two episodes too early. I was expecting to die and that was fine, but after I did, we got into the same-old, same-old with the kids that we’d had for five series.
“I felt we could have explored another avenue for a while, then it would have been more surprising when Logan died. But that was my only quarrel with it.”
Cox has been married to Nicole Ansari-Cox, an actor, director and producer, since 2002 and they have two sons together.
They are now performing together in the debut West End production of The Score, a play about the composer Johann Sebastian Bach (played by Brian) and his confrontation with the warlike Frederick II of Prussia.
Nicole, 55, plays Bach’s wife Anna and Cox says rehearsals were heated at times.
“It takes two to tango,” he says. “We are volatile, I think because we’re passionate. We are stronger now than we’ve ever been, because we allow one another to be who we are, as opposed to being who we want them to be.”
“I think separate bedrooms are important because then you visit one another.
“There’s a sense of… occasion.”
Cox’s next screen appearance will be in the film Glenrothan, due for release in 2025, which he also directs. It’s a story about two brothers – played by him and Alan Cumming – who inherit a distillery in west Scotland.
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