The “astonishing” director Brian Cox will defend to the death: “Incredibly misunderstood”
Brian Cox had already built a long and distinguished acting career, but Succession brought him a new level of fame in recent years. Having spent decades in the industry, the Scottish actor has seen more than most, which makes his views worth paying attention to, especially when he identifies who he believes is cinema’s most misunderstood auteur.
Prior to playing Logan Roy and spending the rest of his days being asked by people in the street for him to tell them to fuck off, Cox’s biggest credits in the mainstream, box office-wise, were Troy and X2: X-Men United; with his most critically acclaimed including Adaptation and Zodiac.
These days, he’s best known for being something of a miserable bastard. Not in a negative way, unless you’re one of the many people who’ve ended up on his shit-list at one time or another, but in a ‘veteran who no longer has any fucks to give’ kind of way.
Countless actors and filmmakers have faced his wrath, ranging from Steven Seagal to Quentin Tarantino, but there’s one director that Cox can’t bring himself to say a bad word about. In fact, he thinks they’ve spent too much of their career receiving the short end of the stick. A firebrand, influence, and inspiration to several generations, he holds Spike Lee in high esteem.
“Ah, there’s a director. Astonishing, Spike Lee,” he told AV Club. “A feisty guy, but a guy who’s, I think, incredibly misunderstood. I think people review his politics or his colour as opposed to his filmmaking sometimes. Because he’s a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker and a lover of the art. He stands up for things, but he’s also a brilliant storyteller who really understands the whole.”
Cox stars in Lee’s 2002 film 25th Hour, which follows a convicted drug dealer who reflects on his life during the 24 hours before he is imprisoned for seven years – “When it came out, people said, ‘Oh, it’s nothing,'” he observed, but times have changed.
“People keep coming back to certain scenes and saying, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting, that’s amazing.’ Like Ed Norton’s diatribe to the mirror, the hate speech.”
Brian Cox on 25th Hour
25th Hour, coming out the year after the 9/11 attacks, engages with the backdrop of a changed New York City and incorporates the event into its core themes, which Cox praises. “It’s about a kind of America that’s changing,” says the actor. “Which is why Spike plugged it straight into 9/11 in that sequence where they look down into that black hole of Ground Zero. It’s a very, very vibrant film.”
It wasn’t rapturously received at the time, at least not when compared to Lee’s catalogue of classics dating back to the 1980s, but the film has since taken its place among the auteur’s most overlooked and underrated works, a status that Cox clearly believes it deserves.
While there’s an obvious hint of bias, since he was in it, you can’t say he’s wrong, either – not only does the actor think that 25th Hour was misunderstood as a film, but he’s adamant that its director has spent their entire career experiencing the same thing.
