Why leaving Logan Roy behind wasn’t easy for Succession star Brian Cox

Playing Logan Roy in the long running hit series made Brian Cox a star. Now, as he returns to his home town for a new play, he talks about his life and career.

Scottish actor Brian Cox attends at a premiere of Succession in Madrid, Spain in 2023. Picture: Getty Images.

Brian Cox is back in the city where he – and foul-mouthed media tycoon Logan Roy, whom he embodied so terrifyingly in Succession – started. Newly 79, Cox is rehearsing at the Dundee Rep, his first employer after, aged 15, he landed a job as “assistant to the assistant”. He is starring in Make It Happen, a new play by James Graham – a fantastical take on the 2008 fall of the mighty Royal Bank of Scotland under the ruinous reign of its CEO, Fred “The Shred” Goodwin. Cox plays the ghost of Scotland’s most famous economist, Adam Smith, who is haunting Goodwin. He is a foul-mouthed spirit. “It’s an infection from Logan,” Cox says.

For Cox these weeks in Dundee are a family reunion. In the theatre cafe where, as a diabetic, he is taking a somewhat urgent lunch, he recalls the day more than 60 years ago when he walked into the Rep (“not the same building, but the same ethos”). “It’s always difficult because it’s so alien, you know, a working-class kid, virtually an orphan, to come into a situation like this. And that’s why theatre is so important to me, because it’s family. Sometimes it’s not a good family and sometimes it reflects what all families go through, but it’s still family as far as I’m concerned.”

Cox as Logan Roy in a scene from Succession.

That day Cox witnessed a fist fight between two actors, one of whom was Nicol Williamson, one of the greatest performers of his day. “The air,” he writes in his delightful memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, “was blue.” Seeing the young Cox’s horror, actor Gawn Grainger (Zoe Wanamaker’s husband, who died in May) assured him the pair “were just a little overexcited after a night on the bevy”.

I compare his nonchalance to last year when Cox was reported to Equity for losing his temper during rehearsals for a production of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. “Nicol wouldn’t have lasted two minutes today,” he says. “It’s this whole woke nonsense. You can’t say boo to a goose. I mean, I just lost my temper and I said, ‘I’m not losing my temper at you. I’m losing my temper at me. I’m the one who’s having the problem, not you’.”

Cox is a warm and generous interviewee, and remarkably unlike Logan Roy. Nevertheless, I am reassured that he shares at least some of Roy’s takes on wokery. He was certainly keeping them under cover when we talked three years ago alongside his younger and more progressive-minded wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, whose play, She/Her, he was producing at the Edinburgh Fringe. She told me firmly that “trans women are women”, and her husband held his counsel.

Cox says now he was being respectful to her work, on which she did “a fantastic job”, but he certainly does not see the trans issue as cut and dried. “I mean, it’s fine to say, ‘Well, if you feel you’re a boy, let’s go down that route and see what that means without actually taking the ultimate step’. Or vice versa. Then you can find out. But at the moment they want to do it all too quickly. I think it creates a lot more problems. It certainly ­creates a lot more difficulties than it solves.”

Ansari, a German actor whom Cox married in 2002, is his second wife. His first wife was actor Caroline Burt, who divorced him after 18 years in 1986. He was shocked, although in neither of his two memoirs does he paint himself as a devoted or faithful husband, or an attentive father to their son and daughter.

Cox as Churchill, with Miranda Richardson as Churchill's wife Clementine in the 2017 film.

In contrast, his two sons with Ansari have seen much more of their dad. They are now in their 20s and over six foot, and he is experiencing parental nostalgia. “I miss my boys when they were little. They were such a delight. I never felt it with my other family because I was probably too selfish and self-obsessed.”

Cox barely had a paternal model to emulate. His father, a benevolent shopkeeper who lent money to needy customers, died of pancreatic cancer when Cox was eight. His mother, guilty for “being on his case”, subsequently suffered a series of breakdowns, and he was largely brought up by his three sisters. “In many ways losing my parents empowered me in a way that I never realised. When you’ve lost your parents – and at that age – you’re incredibly free. There’s nobody telling you what to do or what to be or where to go. So the world is your oyster in a way that you didn’t expect. So you pursue that, which led me to the theatre.”

Early on he found a father ­figure in actor Fulton Mackay (unjustly now mainly remembered for Ronnie Barker’s 1970s sitcom, Porridge), who warned him not to worry about being a star and concentrate on being a good actor. He is not sure he did want to be a star but it was sound advice anyway. Cox went on to play many of the great Shakespearean roles, including Lear and Titus Andronicus, and enjoyed later success in Hollywood, often portraying villains; while his UK films include 2017’s Churchill. Yet in his 70s, thanks to Succession, he did become a supernova of a star. Rare is the day someone does not ask him to tell them, in full Logan Roy, to “f. k off”. My favourite Roy line comes in the last series when he discusses the chances of life after death: “You can’t know. But I’ve got my f. king suspicions.”

Cox long ago gave up on his family’s Catholic faith but is not uninterested in the subject. “My great fantasy now I’m in my late 70s is: ‘How am I going to die?’ I think, ‘maybe I’ll get run over, maybe I’ll fall down stairs’.”

Believing he was written out a touch early, he has still not watched the seven Succession episodes that followed Logan’s death in the final season. I recommend the “Logan’s funeral” instalment. “I’ve seen bits of it. I did focus on Kieran (Culkin), who I was deeply fond of. That boy had been out of work such a long time before he did that.” And now he has won an Oscar for A Real Pain? “For me, it’s the great success story of Succession that he’s got his just rewards.”

Cox, centre,, laughing with actor Kieran Culkin, with other Succession cast members, from left: Alan Ruck, Sarah Snook, Alexander Skarsgard, Nicholas Braun, Matthew Macfadyen and J. Smith-Cameron at the 2024 Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. Picture: AFP

As for the wealth late stardom has brought Cox, he is almost contemptuous of it. “I’m still the same and this attention to the detail of wealth freaks me out. I don’t like talking about it. I get embarrassed. People just keep giving me clothes. I’ve got a stylist and all that bollocks. They were talking about how much I earn the other day and I just said, ‘I don’t want to know that, thank you very much. Please keep that information to yourself’. God almighty! Really? What a responsibility, living up to it apart from anything else.”

One thing wealth has brought is a separate London home for his wife, to add to the ones they share in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Partly to escape Donald Trump’s second term, they are based in Britain now, she in a three-bedroom flat, he nine minutes’ walk away over Primrose Hill. He explains the arrangement as an extension of their separate bedrooms in their other homes (they “visit” each other). “But when I go to her flat I always feel I’m imposing. She said: ‘Come, you’ve got to come over. Why don’t you come?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s a long walk …’. Then I go and I’m fine. But I’m always a bit nervous when I go there.”

After Logan’s backstory was retconned to have him born in Dundee, the magnate revisits the city, but when driven to his family home he refuses to get out and look at it. Cox, in contrast, has been back to the cramped, bathless tenement flat he lived in as a child but he finds it painful to walk around Dundee now. “Not because I don’t love it, because I do love it. I find it painful to see the neglect. You see things like this theatre and think, ‘oh wow, isn’t this wonderful?’. And the new V & A museum. But then they build that stupid building in front of the V & A!” (It houses Social Security Scotland.)

Afterwards I make a trip to his childhood home a 20-minute walk from where we have been talking. It is a granite building with a view of the River Tay and does not look uncared for. From this street, from a home in which three of his sisters shared one settee bed and he and his brother slept together in an alcove, there emerged this volcanic talent. Cox has come a long way, but Dundee deserves to have him back.

The Times