Succession star Brian Cox on The Lord of the Rings, Ian McKellen’s Gandalf and the time he got fired
Succession star Brian Cox says his mighty voice has been the key to his career but ahead of the release of his anime Lord of the Rings movie, he reveals the one time he couldn’t get the job done.
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The first time Brian Cox flew all the way to New Zealand to work on a movie adapted from a beloved fantasy novel written by an Oxford scholar, things didn’t end too well.
“I was fired,” says Cox with laugh over Zoom call from London.
The classically trained, Emmy-winning actor who audiences loved to hate as media titan Logan Roy in four seasons of Succession had been tapped to provide the voice of regal lion Aslan in the 2005 movie adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
The problem was that not only did he not have a visual reference for the heroic, Christ-like character, he was also getting conflicting instructions on how to play him and was eventually replaced by Liam Neeson.
“I’m not vain about it, but I think I do know how to speak,” Cox says in the silky Scottish burr that has narrated films, documentaries, audiobooks, animations, radio plays and even video games across his 60-year career.
“That’s one advantage I have got. So when I was fired – I flew all the way to New Zealand and when I was in the studio for the first day in Christchurch and it was a wonderful, lovely few days. But the problem was that the director wanted it quiet and the sound engineer wanted it much more dynamic and bigger.
“I could see what was going on and of course from the actor’s point of view I do the delivery – how you distort it is your business. So it was tough. But they paid me and that was the main thing.”
Cox says there were no hard feelings from the experience – “that’s the business of being an actor, it’s disappointment and it’s what keeps you going” – and when the opportunity came around again for another for another fantasy voiceover role, he didn’t hesitate.
This time around he’s adapting the work of Lewis’ great friend and fellow Oxford scholar J.R.R Tolkien, the literary giant behind The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.
Cox is providing the voice of another king, Helm Hammerhand, in the new anime film, The War Of the Rohirrim, which is set 183 years before the events that played out in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of movie adaptation, using details lifted from the appendices of Tolkien’s books.
While Jackson wasn’t directly involved in making the new film, directed by Japanese anime great Kenji Kamiyama, it’s produced by his fellow Kiwi Philippa Boyens, who also played a key role in the LOTR trilogy.
After seeing Cox’s celebrated 1987 performance in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus – for which he won the prestigious Best Actor Olivier Award – Boyens thought he would be perfect for the feared and hot-headed King of Rohan, and then had the good sense to give him free rein to do what he does best.
“I was like ‘this guy knows what he’s doing, I’m just getting out of his way’,” says Boyens in a separate interview. “And Kamiyama was exactly the same. It was great. We did calls beforehand we talked about it, and it sparked stuff. I think he took it on was because he knew what to do with it. He was like ‘I know this guy, I know this character, I think I know what to bring to it’. He’s a girl Dad and a father, so that came into play for sure.
“Voice is everything to him and he’s not afraid of heightened language or the musicality of that heightened language. He can just go for it. We were so lucky.”
Cox, 78, says his love for voice work – he can also be heard as the voice of Santa Claus in the just-released Netflix family film That Christmas – comes from his lifelong passion for the radio, beginning in the days before television.
“I was raised on the radio because I was a child in the very early ‘50s and I remember when television came in and we all went to see it on my pal’s small TV set in 1953 and I was 7 or eight,” he says. “And the radio in the UK is second to none – Hancock’s Half Hour and those kinds of shows, Much Binding in the Marsh, really extraordinary stuff. So it’s really been the centre of me in many ways.
“I love it because you can be anything without even putting on makeup or a costume. It’s all in the voice, and I’m proud of the fact that I have a voice for this work. I think it’s sustained me as an actor, the use of the voice. It’s something I would always want to do, more than anything, actually.”
Despite it being one of the best-selling books of all time and a British cultural institution, Cox admits he wasn’t familiar with Tolkien’s work as a younger man and it took Jackson’s trilogy of films to put it on his radar.
“The films made me read the books to be honest,” he says. “I had no literary knowledge of Tolkien at all and was never really attracted by those kind of mythologies. I like Homer – not that I am a Greek scholar or anything – but I like those mythologies much better. But I didn’t know about them and subsequently I have been awoken to them and I think Peter has done a genius job in getting them out to the world.”
Though he says he’d loved to have been part of the LOTR films, there’s one part he wouldn’t touch. Even though Cox had admitted his differences with his friend and sometime colleague Ian McKellen over his “front foot” acting style in his autobiography Putting the Rabbit Into the Hat, he says he was “an extraordinary Gandalf”.
“When Ian takes off, he’s pretty hard to beat,” says Cox. “You can quarrel with other things but there is nobody who takes off like Ian and he does Gandalf exquisitely.”
While the Lord of the Rings never really went away, the world has had a resurgence recently with the launch Amazon’s prequel series The Rings of Power, which is now two seasons into a planned five-season arc. Boyens says she deliberately hasn’t seen the TV show to avoid being influenced in future projects but she says she loved the idea from the moment it was announced, and admires “anyone who wants to tackle a story within the world of the Middle-earth and Professor Tolkien’s mythology”.
“It’s not easy but you can’t probably can’t have too much,” she says. “Hopefully a great TV series will just encourage people that want more.”
Jackson is set to return to the franchise as a producer on The Hunt for Gollum, which is currently in production in New Zealand with Andy Serkis, who provided the groundbreaking motion capture for the title character in the original films, directing.
“We’re at the fun stage where anything is possible and everything is possible,” says Boyens, who hopes that Viggo Mortensen will also return as Aragorn for the movie due for release in 2026. “It’s been really interesting. I had forgotten how much story was still in there so that’s been interesting.
“Andy’s just phenomenal so I have loved working with him, and he has just continued to grow. I think he was born to be a director at some point – that was always going to happen but I think he’s just grown into it now where I really want to see what he’s going to do with this. And so I know Pete does as well.”
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is in cinemas now.
Originally published as Succession star Brian Cox on The Lord of the Rings, Ian McKellen’s Gandalf and the time he got fired
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