The performance Brian Cox based on Stewie Griffin: “That’s an interesting idea”
A fun thing about actors is that they will sometimes freely admit to taking inspiration from truly odd places for a particular role. Take Brian Cox, for example. He played one of the most famous people in British history in a 2017 drama and admitted that part of his vision for the character was derived from a murderous cartoon baby. That’s right, he based the performance on Stewie Griffin from Family Guy. Best of all, though, when you listen to the Succession star explain why he made that unique decision, it doesn’t seem as silly as it would initially appear. In fact, it sounds perfectly logical.
When Cox signed up to play Winston Churchill in Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill, he beat Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance as the Prime Minister to the screen by over six months. While Oldman’s Darkest Hour followed Churchill in the early period of World War II, Churchill was set in 1944 and saw the politician exhausted by years of war. The film shows him nervously waiting for the Normandy landings, which he is utterly convinced will be a disaster for the war effort.
Over the years, many acclaimed stars have portrayed Churchill at various points of his life. In the last 20 years alone, outside of Cox and Oldman, Timothy Spall played him in The King’s Speech, Michael Gambon starred in Churchill’s Secret, Brendan Gleeson tried his hand in Into the Storm, John Lithgow took on the part in The Crown, and Rory Kinnear rocked up in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. There has been no shortage of Churchills on offer, but Cox still felt he had found a new wrinkle to the man.
First of all, he put on weight to fully embody Churchill—mostly because he’s not a fan of achieving transformations through makeup and prosthetics. He told The Guardian, “I don’t believe in all that. Really, I don’t. I had a little prosthetic – I have a cleft chin, so I filled in my chin, but that was it.”
Secondly, he built his performance in a deeply unusual way by imagining what Churchill was like as a baby. He revealed that he’d always heard people joking about how all babies look like Churchill, and this made him think, “That’s an interesting idea; the idea of the child.” When he researched Churchill’s childhood, he found out that his mother was a flighty American socialite, and his father suffered from mental health problems brought on by syphilis.
It all clicked, though, when Cox was watching TV one night with his family. His sons were watching Family Guy, and Cox became transfixed by Stewie. He revealed, “He has these blue-collar parents, he speaks with a perfect English accent, he lives in his own world, he’s cantankerous, his nature shifts, and he becomes quite nasty.” He also noticed that Stewie had a great capacity for love and affection, especially toward his frenemy Brian, the talking family dog – and this jived with Churchill, too. After all, he was a noted animal lover who owned a bulldog named Dodo and a poodle named Rufus.
To Cox, the idea of channelling Stewie as Churchill began to make perfect sense. The emotional parallels with the fiercely determined wartime icon were striking, and their similar backgrounds made them unusually close bedfellows.
Naturally, though, it also helped Stewie’s case that, “Of course, he does look like a baby Winston Churchill.”
