“As ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen”: The actor Brian Cox deeply disliked
His career may have started in the late 1960s, but it’s only very recently that Brian Cox has experienced fame to a degree that makes him openly uncomfortable.
A distinguished veteran of film, television, and theatre, Cox has been kept constantly busy for almost 60 years, but it was the role of Logan Roy in Succession that gained him more mainstream recognition and awareness than ever before. Befitting his famously curmudgeonly reputation, he isn’t too keen on it.
Even though he’d won two Olivier Awards for his work on the stage before the end of the 1980s, became the first person to play Hannibal Lecter – or Lecktor, in his case – in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, lent support in Mel Gibson’s Academy Award-winning Braveheart, antagonised Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in an X-Men sequel, pissed off Matt Damon in The Bourne Supremacy, and scooped a Primetime Emmy as Hermann Göring in docudrama Nuremberg, it’s telling people to fuck off that ruined his life.
“One thing I have lost is my anonymity, which I prized,” he wistfully told the BBC. “It is a double-edged sword. The success, I am not going to knock it, but at the same time everybody knows who I am now. People would say, ‘You’re…?’. I loved the fact people didn’t know what to say because I had done so much variation. But now Logan Roy is it, as far as the general public is concerned.”
Cox put that very politely by his standards, compared to the way he ripped the likes of Johnny Depp, Quentin Tarantino, Joaquin Phoenix, and Edward Norton to shreds in his autobiography Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. Never let it be forgotten that he worked with Steven Seagal on the terrible 1996 buddy cop action flick The Glimmer Man, either, where the leading man made quite the impression.
Describing the aikido enthusiast as being “as ludicrous in real life as he appears on-screen,” Cox took aim at Seagal’s self-curated persona. “He radiates a studied serenity, although he’s on a higher plane to the rest of us. And while he’s certainly on a different plane, no doubt about that, it’s probably not a higher one.”
Echoing the belief of many people to have entered Seagal’s orbit over the years, the withering takedown continued, with Cox convinced he’s guilty of “thinking himself far more capable and talented than he actually is, oblivious to the fact that an army of people are helping to prop up his delusion.” There’s a lot of people in Hollywood who hate Seagal with varying degrees of passion and intensity, but few have been so eloquent about it.
Hardly revelatory to find out that somebody didn’t have a whale of a time working with him, then, but Cox’s character assassination is easily among the most verbose.
