Succession actor Brian Cox has commented on Rupert Murdoch’s own succession plan while seemingly criticising the media mogul for imposing his worldview on other people.
Cox told the BBC he thought Murdoch may have spent too much time watching the HBO hit series that draws heavily on real-life dramas within the Murdoch dynasty.
Golden Globe winner Cox, who portrays family patriarch Logan Roy in the series, said on the weekend that Murdoch’s announcement that he would be stepping down as chair of News Corp and Fox to make way for his eldest son was not surprising.
“I think he’s been watching too much Succession, clearly,” Cox said of Murdoch’s decision to anoint Lachlan over his siblings Elisabeth and James.
“He’s probably the most tenacious human on God’s earth. He’s just kept on going but I think eventually there comes a point when he has to stop and it had to happen and it’s happened.”
Cox said he suspected Rupert Murdoch’s mental health at 92 was “pretty good … but the workload must be too much now”.
The actor was critical of Murdoch’s interpretation of press freedom, however, responding to the media boss’s statement last week when he said: “The battle for the freedom of speech and, ultimately, the freedom of thought, has never been more intense. My father [Keith Murdoch] firmly believed in freedom and Lachlan is absolutely committed to the cause.”
Cox took issue with Murdoch’s “generalised” statement.
“Freedom? Freedom for what? Freedom to impose his ideas on other people, freedom to kind of manipulate certain things in certain directions? I mean, he’s certainly done a lot of that in his life,” he told the BBC.
Cox said his Succession character differed from Murdoch in a crucial way – the fictional mogul is self-made while the real-life latter inherited and built on his father’s empire. But, he said, both were “very conniving” to achieve their own ends.
The septuagenarian actor, who is currently in rehearsals for the Theatre Royal Bath’s production of Oliver Cotton’s The Score (Cox will play Johann Sebastian Bach), declined to offer an opinion on whether Lachlan was “Kendall, Roman or Connor”.
“I’m not sure which one he is because I kind of keep out of the whole Murdoch thing.
“Because when you play a role, it’s your creation. The one thing that there is in common is how little Rupert actually expresses himself and he allows things [actions] to speak for itself.”
