Brian Cox: ‘Wealth? I get embarrassed'

Times

3 days ago

Brian Cox is back in the city where he — and the foul-mouthed media tycoon Logan Roy, whom he embodied so terrifyingly in Succession — started. Newly 79, Cox is rehearsing at the Dundee Rep, his first employer after, aged 15, he landed a job as 'assistant to the assistant'. He is starring in Make It Happen, a new play by James Graham, who wrote Dear England for the National Theatre and the BBC's Sherwood. It is a fantastical take on the 2008 fall of the mighty Royal Bank of Scotland under the ruinous reign of its CEO Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin. Cox plays the ghost of Scotland's most famous economist, Adam Smith, who is haunting Goodwin. He is a foul-mouthed spirit. 'It's an infection from Logan,' Cox says, crediting Graham's nod to the meta.
In the play Smith, who was primarily a philosopher and did not even recognise the word 'economist', is shocked that he is remembered for his book The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, rather than his earlier Theory of Moral Sentiments. The latter insisted on man's obligations to his fellow citizens; the former has come to be regarded as a panegyric to free markets red in tooth and claw.
Yet the former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown is a fan and supports attempts to rescue Smith from co-option by 'neoliberal zealots'. He and Cox are old acquaintances. Brown, the actor tells me, would write to him from Downing Street complaining that people were always telling him to smile. So, I say, Laurence Olivier persuaded Mrs Thatcher to take elocution lessons, and Cox taught Brown to smile? 'No, I didn't tell him to smile,' he replies. 'I just said, 'Be yourself.''
For Cox these weeks in Dundee are a family reunion. In the theatre café where, as a diabetic, he is taking a somewhat urgent lunch, he recalls the day more than 60 years ago when he walked into the Rep ('not the same building, but the same ethos'). 'It's always difficult because it's so alien, you know, a working-class kid, virtually an orphan, to come into a situation like this. And that's why theatre is so important to me, because it's family. It really is family. And I've always found that it's family. Sometimes it's not a good family and sometimes it reflects what all families go through, but it's still family as far as I'm concerned.'
On arriving that day he witnessed a fistfight between two actors, one of whom was Nicol Williamson, one of the greatest performers of his day. 'The air,' he writes in his delightful memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, 'was blue'. Seeing the young Cox's horror, the actor Gawn Grainger (Zoë Wanamaker's husband, who died only this May) assured him the pair 'were just a little overexcited after a night on the bevy'.
I compare his nonchalance to last year when Cox was reported to Equity for losing his temper during rehearsals for a production of A Long Day's Journey Into Night. 'Nicol wouldn't have lasted two minutes today,' he says. 'It's this whole woke nonsense. You can't say boo to a goose. I mean, I just lost my temper and I said, 'I'm not losing my temper at you. I'm losing my temper at me. I'm the one who's having the problem, not you.''
• Brian Cox and his wife: 'We had four years that were pure hell'
Cox, whom I have talked to several times over the past two decades, is a warm and generous interviewee and remarkably unlike Logan Roy. Nevertheless, I am reassured that he shares at least some of Roy's takes on wokery. He was certainly keeping them undercover when we talked three years ago alongside his younger and more progressive-minded wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, whose play She/Her he was producing at the Edinburgh Fringe. She told me firmly that 'trans women are women', and her husband held his counsel. He says now he was being respectful to her work, on which she did 'a fantastic job', but he certainly does not see the trans issue as cut and dried. 'I mean, it's fine to say, 'Well, if you feel you're a boy, let's go down that route and see what that means without actually taking the ultimate step.' Or vice versa. Then you can find out. But at the moment they want to do it all too quickly. I think it creates a lot more problems. It certainly creates a lot more difficulties than it solves.'
Ansari, a German actress whom he met in Hamburg while playing Lear and married in 2002, is his second wife — although you may have read she is his third. Wikipedia claims he was married for a year to Lilian Monroe-Carr between 1966 and 1967. 'That was my first mother-in-law!' he exclaims. His actual first wife was the actress Caroline Burt, who divorced him after 18 years in 1986. He was shocked, although in neither of his two memoirs does he paint himself as a devoted or faithful husband or an attentive father to their son and daughter.
In contrast his two sons with Ansari have seen much more of their dad. When I first met him they were tiny and he admitted they were rather scared of him, 'this big white-haired figure'. When we spoke again in 2020, during lockdown, he gently complained that the teenagers slept all day, went 'crazy on their devices all night' and burnt popcorn at 3am. They are now in their twenties and over six foot, and he is experiencing parental nostalgia. 'I miss my boys when they were little. They were such a delight. I never felt it with my other family because I was probably too selfish and self-obsessed. But now I just miss them. I miss them terribly.'
Cox barely had a paternal model to emulate. His father, a benevolent shopkeeper who lent money to needy customers, died of pancreatic cancer when he was eight. His mother, guilty for 'being on his case', subsequently suffered a series of breakdowns and Cox was largely brought up by his three sisters. 'The irony was that in many ways losing my parents empowered me in a way that I never realised. When you've lost your parents — and at that age — you're incredibly free. There's nobody telling you what to do or what to be or where to go. So the world is your oyster in a way that you didn't expect it to be your oyster. So you pursue that, which led me to the theatre.'
• Brian Cox: 'I woke up stark naked holding half of my tooth'
Early on he found a father figure in the actor Fulton MacKay (unjustly now mainly remembered for Ronnie Barker's sitcom Porridge), who warned him not to worry about being a star and concentrate on being a good actor. He tells me he is not sure he did want to be a star but it was sound advice anyway. Cox went on to play many of the great Shakespearean roles, including Lear and Titus Andronicus, and enjoyed later success in Hollywood, often portraying villains.
Yet in his seventies, thanks to Succession, he did become a supernova of a star. Rare is the day someone does not ask him to tell them, in full Logan Roy, to 'f*** off'. My favourite Roy line comes in the last series when he discusses the chances of life after death: 'You can't know. But I've got my f***ing suspicions.'
Cox long ago gave up on his family's Catholic faith but is not uninterested in the subject. 'My great fantasy now I'm in my late seventies is, 'How am I going to die?' I think, maybe I'll get run over, maybe I'll fall down stairs. A lot of people die by falling. So I'm constantly fantasising about my demise.'
Believing he was written out a touch early, he has still not watched the seven Succession episodes that followed Logan's death in the final season. I recommend the Logan's funeral instalment in particular. 'I've seen bits of it. I did focus on Kieran [Culkin], who I was deeply fond of. That boy had been out of work such a long time before he did that.' And now he has won an Oscar for A Real Pain? 'For me it's the great success story of Succession that he's got his just rewards.'
As for the wealth that late stardom has brought Cox, he is almost contemptuous of it. 'I haven't changed. I'm still the same and this attention to the detail of wealth freaks me out. I don't like talking about it. I get embarrassed. I've got so many clothes now. People just keep giving me clothes. I've got a stylist and all that bollocks. They were talking about how much I earn the other day and I just said, 'I don't want to know that, thank you very much. Please keep that information to yourself.' God almighty! Really? What a responsibility, living up to it apart from anything else.'
• Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews
One thing wealth has brought is a separate London home for his wife, to add to the ones they share in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Partly to escape Trump's second term, they are based in Britain now, she in a three-bedroom flat, he nine minutes' walk away over Primrose Hill. He explains the arrangement as an extension of their separate bedrooms in their other homes (they 'visit' each other). 'But when I go to her flat I always feel I'm imposing. She said, 'Come, you've got to come over. Why don't you come?' I said, 'Well, it's a long walk …' Then I go and I'm fine. But I'm always a bit nervous when I go there.'
After Logan's backstory was ret-conned to have him born in Dundee, the magnate revisits the city, but when driven to his family home he refuses to get out and look at it. Cox, in contrast, has been back to the cramped, bathless tenement flat he lived in as a child but he finds it painful to walk around Dundee now. 'Not because I don't love it, because I do love it. I find it painful to see the neglect. You see things like this theatre and think, 'Oh wow! Isn't this wonderful?' And the new V&A museum. But then they build that stupid building in front of the V&A!' (It houses Social Security Scotland.)
Afterwards I make a trip to his childhood home a 20-minute walk from where we have been talking. It is a granite building with a view of the Tay and does not look uncared for. What surprises me as a southern Englander, however, is that you can buy a two-bedroom flat in the street for just £85,000. It is as Cox says: the wealth of the nation has not rearranged itself northwards for a very long time. And yet from this street, from a home in which three of his sisters shared one settee bed and he and his brother slept together in an alcove, there emerged this volcanic talent. Cox has come a long way, but Dundee deserves to have him back.
Make It Happen is at the Dundee Rep Theatre, Jul 18-26, dundeerep.co.uk, then at the Edinburgh International Festival, Aug 1-9, eif.co.uk