Brian Cox names the one actor he’d love to work with the most: “There is still the possibility”
The older an actor gets, the less likely they are to harbour regrets over the things they haven’t done. That might be true to a certain extent for Brian Cox, but there’s still one elusive white whale he’s been chasing for years that continues to remain agonisingly out of reach.
The grizzled Scotsman hasn’t left many stones unturned during a career that began in the late 1960s and kept him ticking along just the way he liked it: as a character actor constantly employed and able to rub shoulders with the best and brightest of stage and screen while rarely being the main attraction and avoiding the additional scrutiny that comes with it.
Of course, all good things must eventually come to an end, and for Cox, it was the role of Succession‘s Logan Roy that brought his anonymity to an end. He’d spent half a century as a recognisable face from movies, TV shows, and stage productions that everybody had seen, but it wasn’t until he started telling everyone to fuck off that his fame reached its pinnacle.
That might sound like a simplification when talking about a star who’d already won two Baftas, a Primetime Emmy, and two Olivier Awards long before he first stepped into the boardroom in Jesse Armstrong’s riveting drama, but Cox would be the first to admit that Succession completely changed his life. For someone in their late 70s who hates playing the game, he wasn’t entirely thrilled about it.
His lifelong love of cinema was fostered at a very early age, and Cox has held onto a certain set of performers as his personal favourites since his youngest days. The downside is that most of them have since popped their clogs to guarantee he’ll never be able to spar with them on set, but there’s a notable exception he’s keeping his fingers crossed for.
“I’d have loved to have been on set with Spencer Tracy to observe how he works, or Marlon Brando or Katharine Hepburn,” he told The Guardian. “There are some actors I’ve been very lucky to work with, like [Laurence] Olivier and Ian McKellen. I’d absolutely love to work with Meryl Streep. There is still the possibility of that. You never know. Something may come along.”
The pair have at least met, leading to a very awkward moment when Cox decides the best way to introduce himself to the living legend for the first time is to tell her he hates her. That wouldn’t have gotten them off on the right foot, were it not for the fact he quickly clarified that he merely despised her for how good at acting she was, to the extent Streep makes everybody else around her look substandard by comparison.
