As I leave the office, my editor wishes me luck. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!” she says. A moment later, the deputy editor asks where I’m off to. To see Brian Cox, the actor, I say. “Oh!” she says, with a rather-you-than-me look. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!”
Cox has played grumpy for going on 60 years. All sorts of grumpiness – idiot grumpy (independent candidate Bob Servant in the TV comedy of the same name), world-weary grumpy (school principal Dr Nelson Guggenheim in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore), psychopathic grumpy (the first movie incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter), egomaniacal grumpy (Robert McKee in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation) and, of course, brutal grumpy as media mogul Logan Roy in the TV series Succession. In recent years, he has often appeared on chatshows being grumpy about the state of the world. In 2022, he published his hugely entertaining memoirs, in which he was grumpy about method acting, useless directors, vain thesps, useless politicians, the church, capitalism, cancel culture, you name it. He was also fabulously indiscreet – Steven Seagal, whom he worked with on The Glimmer Man, is “as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen”, Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”, Tarantino’s work is “meretricious”, Edward Norton is “a nice lad, but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director”, while Michael Caton-Jones, who directed him in Rob Roy, is a “complete arsehole”.
* * *
‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years,” Cox says with an angelic smile. “The problem is, I can be quite a loudmouth. Sometimes I have been fairly volatile, and I think, ‘Why the fuck did you say that?’” He’s looking back over his epic career. “There’s a lot of stuff I’ve done which I look at and think, ‘That was crap.’” But today’s not the time for negativity. “No, I’m not going to go down that road.”
Blimey, I say, we’re going to have to out you as a diplomat? He laughs – a lovely youthful chuckle. “Yes! You can out me as a diplomat!” he says enthusiastically. The thing is, he adds, certain people are overrated. We’re talking about his memoirs, and the unflinching references to the likes of Depp and Seagal. “But then they probably think they’re overrated as well. So I’m not saying anything they don’t think anyway.”
We meet at a hotel in London’s West End, close to the Haymarket theatre where he’s rehearsing The Score, about the ageing Bach, directed by Trevor Nunn. Cox stars in the play opposite his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, who is playing his stage wife. Cox looks so dapper in 50 shades of brown – brogues, socks, checked trousers and jacket, all offset with a purple tie. As a young man, he looked older than his years – a squat, Sherman tank of a man made for middle age. Now, at 78, with snow-white hair and a goatee, he looks surprisingly youthful.
I ask him why he so often gets cast as grumps. He holds his hands up, nonplussed. Is it because he is one? “No, I’m not like that at all. It’s the antithesis of who I am, actually.” He stops to think about it. “No, that’s not entirely true. Of course, I get grumpy. Particularly about politics, I get very grumpy. A lot of that makes me angry. The failure of the Labour party in particular.” Pause. “But I don’t want to get into that.” Another pause. “Listen, I could go on for ages.” And another.
One, two, three. And he’s off. “I don’t know why the Labour party is called the Labour party. It’s not labour orientated. I just think … ”
He exhales with loud disappointment. “Keir Hardie, the guy who started it all, was an extraordinary man. And it was a very inclusive thing he was after – social justice. And this lot coming in now, they’re not exercising social justice. It’s true that the last lot left us in deep shit, so there’s a lot of stuff they’ve got to do, but they’ve got to be a bit canny about it in order not to alienate the folk. And Starmer is not exactly the most charming of individuals. He’s not Mr Charm. He’s not got the thing Tony Blair had, which served him brilliantly till hubris got the better of him. Starmer is minus one on that score.” Nor does he rate Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, on the charm front. “She’s had a charm bypass. There’s no question.” He laughs again. But he’s worried – for Scotland, for Britain, for Europe, for the world.
Cox has been campaigning with the group Independent Age against the scrapping of the winter fuel payments for pensioners who aren’t on certain benefits, urging older people to check whether they are eligible for pension credit. “I just think it’s not on. It’s unjust. And means testing?” He hisses the word with contempt. “Means testing is something they did in the 30s. And I find that … I don’t know.” He stops, lost for words. “I can’t get with it at all.”
He loves his politics. For many years, he was a Labour loyalist. “I was a big Labour man. I was the voice of Labour for the 1997 campaign.” Eventually, he fell out with Blair over Iraq. As for Corbyn, he says, he was not cut out to be a leader. “Jeremy Corbyn is a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a professional backbencher. He’s a naysayer. And you can’t just be a naysayer, you’ve got to come up with something else in its place. That’s what progress is about.”
And just to show he’s no naysayer, he’ll name the person most suited to the job. “I was all for Andy Burnham.” Unfortunately, he says, Burnham is mayor of Greater Manchester rather than a Labour MP. “But what he’s done in Manchester is phenomenal. And he’s keen on the idea that I’m keen on, which is a federal Britain. I believe the way we will survive and come out of the fucking shite that we’ve been in, and keep regurgitating again and again, is by being a federal society where each country has its own say. You can’t separate these islands off, but we’ve got to come together on a federal basis. Not as subjects.”
* * *
Cox had a fascinating childhood, and is still exploring how it shaped him. He was born in Dundee, to observant Catholic parents. He was the youngest of five siblings – his oldest sister was 17 years his senior. His father, Charles, known as Chic, ran a grocer’s in a deprived part of Dundee; his mother was a spinner in the jute mills. Chic was a kind, sociable man who sold stuff on tick to the needy. “We lived in a tenement, and my dad had the grocer’s shop for 25 years, so he was lower middle class. Not working class.” The flat had two bedrooms – the three girls slept in one room in a single bed, his parents slept in the other, while Cox and his older brother bedded down in the living room.
There were three landmarks within a street of where they lived – the church, the library and the cinema. He went to the church because he had to, the library because he wanted to, and the cinema because he was smitten. “My first love was cinema. There were 21 cinemas in my hometown, and I visited every single one of them.” From the age of six, he went by himself. First, he fell for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s slapstick, then, by the age of nine, he was watching serious films about corruption and thwarted ambition such as On the Waterfront. There was no question, he says, that he would become an actor. “I knew this was my trade.”
Were there any actors he knew, in the family or among friends? “No, but there were performers.” He looks at the biscuit next to his coffee. “D’you want it? I’m diabetic so I can’t eat it. Every Hogmanay the flat was packed with 70 people and I’d be summoned at 1am to perform.” How old was he? “I was three.” Was he the only one summoned? “No, everybody was. My second eldest sister, May, had a great voice. I’d do Al Jolson impersonations. It was weird for a wee boy to sing “Climb up on my knee. Sonny Boy, though you’re only three”! I always remember the effect on the room. There’s something about the room when it’s focused on something. The dynamic changes. Human beings get into a harmony with one another. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I thought, I want to be a part of that.”
When he was eight, his father died and his life was uprooted. They discovered that Chic had given so much away on tick, he had left the family in debt. His mother never recovered from his death and their new poverty, and she had severe mental health problems from then on. Cox was farmed out to his three sisters. He left school at 15 and went to work at Dundee Repertory, and at the age of 17 went to England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
“The 60s were amazing. It was the time of social mobility, when you were welcomed. When I came to drama school, people made it obvious they were happy that I was there. I felt so liberated. London to me has always represented freedom. I loved the sense that I was allowed to be who I was and celebrated for coming from my class.” Does he think he would have a chance of making it nowadays, coming from his background? “No, I wouldn’t. The conditions are so different now.”
He really hoped to be an American movie actor, but of course that was impossible. So he settled for being a British theatre actor. And this is where his identity started to fragment. He wanted to be the best he possibly could be in theatre, and that meant excelling in Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was unambiguously English. So Cox started to think of himself as British at best, possibly even a little bit English, and he became more and more divorced from his Scottishness. He moved away from his homeland physically and mentally.
Ever since he fell out with Blairism, he has been reconnecting with his Scottishness – or more accurately his Celticness. He recently had a DNA test and discovered he is 88% Irish and 12% Scottish. And it makes sense to him now.
Cox campaigned for Scottish independence and became active in the Scottish National party. Did he ever consider going into politics? “Yes. Alex [Salmond] wanted me to stand as an SNP candidate. I just don’t believe in the word national. It’s got too many connotations. It should be called the Scottish Independence party. SIP.” Cox became close to Salmond, the SNP’s former leader who died in October. Salmond was a controversial figure, who was cleared of 12 charges of sexual assault in 2020, with one charge of sexual assault with intent to rape found not proven. “Alex wasn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but his political thinking was quite brilliant. Probably the most brilliant we’ve had. He was a visionary. I saw a lot of Alex. He was great fun, a bon viveur.”
Did he ever warn him about his behaviour? “I never got to that stage. I wish I had. Someone had asked me about his questionable relationship to women. I won’t go into the details. And I think that was problematic.” Was Salmond aware it was problematic? “He wasn’t a fool so he had to be aware of what was going on, but he got let off. He was never salacious in my company. I just liked his brilliance; his sense of the world.”
* * *
One reason Cox wasn’t tempted by politics is that he has always loved his profession. Acting has been a calling; a vocation. Cox gave up on his Catholicism long ago because it made no sense to him. “If you want a real church, go to the theatre; that tells the truth. Or the cinema. Go and see the performing arts.” He talks about the great directors with awe, paying a special tribute to two who have passed on – Michael Elliott who directed him in a stage production of Moby Dick in 1984, and Lindsay Anderson, who cast him in In Celebration, his second film, in 1975, set in the Derbyshire mining town of Langwith, and also starring the great Alan Bates. “Michael Elliott and Lindsay Anderson were the two people who gave me standards – both were of Scottish extraction, it has to be said. It’s a sort of purity of vision. I loved working with both of them. I’ve still got Lindsay’s notes.”
Cox, famously, can’t stand method acting. He believes it’s pointless, selfish, an enemy of the imagination and destroys the atmosphere for others on set. He has described the technique used by his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, who plays one of his three children, as “fucking annoying”. But, today, the newly circumspect Cox would like to accentuate the positive. “He was wonderful to act with. I had no argument with Jeremy’s acting.” But? “He would be an even better actor if he just got rid of that so there would be much more inclusiveness in what he did.”
Isn’t it a pain when you can’t have real conversations with a cast member because they are permanently in character? “Well, it’s not good for the ensemble. It creates hostility. That’s the problem.” Did he talk to Strong about it? “No, not in the way I would like to have talked to him, but it’s a very emotive subject for people who follow the Strasberg line.”
Cox is talking about Lee Strasberg, regarded as the father of method acting in America. Last year, Cox suggested that if Strong had been more relaxed about his technique it would have been helpful for the Succession cast: “Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?” Does he hit the marijuana? “Oh yes,” he says. What does it do for him? “It relaxes me.” He says it was only in middle age that he discovered the joy of a spliff. He was introduced to it by the uncle of a former girlfriend. He does a Cockney wide boy impersonation of him. “He was staying with me, and I’d come home and say it’s difficult for me to switch off, and he said, ‘Have you ever tried the weed?’ I’d always been very against that because when I was young I thought drugs just obfuscated the career path. And probably it would have at that time. So he said, ‘Why don’t you try some weed?’ So I did, and I just thought, ‘Oh GOD! It’s just the best way to get rid of the day.’”
Succession has made Cox more famous than he ever had been. A mixed blessing, he says. Beforehand, he would get stopped by people who recognised him, but didn’t know why. Now there’s no doubt. Strangers not only ask for selfies, they also beg him to tell them to fuck off Logan Roy style, which often he’s happy to do, with feeling.
Looking back at earlier profiles, it’s an astonishing career progression. In the 1980s, when he won the Laurence Olivier award for best actor in a new play for Rat in the Skull, and Critics Circle award for Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, we were told he was a latecomer to success. In his 70s, he has won a Golden Globe and been Emmy nominated three years on the trot for playing Succession’s dyspeptic media mogul, who some have compared to Rupert Murdoch. “There’s a lot of, ‘Oh Brian Cox, isn’t he doing well now?’” he says. “But I’ve done well my whole career. I’ve had a great career.”
Succession has, however, given him opportunities that he might not otherwise have had. He has just finished directing his first movie. Glenrothan is a family saga about a whisky distillery, which he calls his love letter to Scotland. What he has learned most from the experience, he says, is that directing is the wrong word for the job. “I realised I’m not a director, but a curator.” What’s the difference? “Film is a communicative art, where you’re curating brilliant costume designs with brilliant set designs with a brilliant DP. It’s not you. You’re just gathering that together and organising it, rather than saying we must go there and do this and do that. Not me, me, me. I mean the film may be shite, but at least it’s shite on my terms.”
He has worked alongside his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, before; he directed her in 2020 in Sinners, a play about a woman stoned for adultery. “I love directing her. Or even curating her! She’s great – so good, so open.” Before marrying Ansari-Cox, he had two children with the actor Caroline Burt, to whom he was married for 19 years. His oldest is the actor Alan Cox, now in his mid-50s, who played the young John Mortimer in the TV drama A Voyage Round My Father.
Cox has straddled the classes over the years, and known both poverty and considerable wealth. Burt came from an upper middle class family, and they sent their children to prestigious public schools. He has often said he was lacking as a father first time round – impatient, absent. But now he’s not so sure. “I think that’s just to do with the fact that I got married so young first time. I was 21 and had my first kid at 24. It was all alien to me.”
He has experienced being both a young father and an old one. His two sons with Nicole, Orson and Torin (aged 22 and 20, respectively), have grown up in New York, where the family live. He becomes gooey when talking about them. “I still look at their baby pictures. I miss them from when they were small. They’re now grown adults. They’re ridiculously tall, which is embarrassing because I’m only 5ft 8in and Nicole’s 5ft 2in.” How tall are they? “6ft 4in and 6ft 3in. It’s something about America. I used to think, ‘If I go to America, I’ll grow tall. Well, I’ll be taller.’ And of course I never lived in America when I was young, so I never got tall!”
As a US citizen, how does he feel about the return of Donald Trump as president? “The penny doesn’t seem to drop about him. I can’t understand it. That’s why it’s so shocking. A man known to be sexist, racist, a suspected rapist … ” He turns puce, and struggles to get the words out. “And he’s got a big Catholic vote behind him … and I kept thinking, ‘How does that tie in with Catholic consciousness?’” No wonder, he says, that he gave up on religion. “It’s all bollocks. BOLLOCKS,” he roars. I’ve never met anybody who says bollocks with such ferocity. Then he rows back. “I don’t want to be disrespectful of people who believe, so bollocks is a bit harsh.”
The older he gets, the more he wants to know why we’re on Earth – what our purpose is, if there is any. And the re-election of Trump makes him even more baffled. “We don’t understand who the fuck we are. We really don’t. We have no fucking clue who we are. How did we get to a stage where 80 million Americans will elect this fucking, you know, to become president.” He says “fucking” every bit as ferociously as he does “bollocks”.
Does the US election make him lose faith in people?” “No, it doesn’t make me lose faith in people. It just makes me realise people are stupid. We’re in for a pretty rough old four years coming up.” Does he think he’ll stay in the US with Trump in power? “I don’t know. I’ve got to because my sons are there. But I’ll try to spend as much time here as I can.”
* * *
We change the subject to something more positive. He tells me how he got together with Nicole. He’d previously met her one evening in 1990, when he was playing Lear in Hamburg. They talked, they danced, and then eight years elapsed before they saw each other again. By now he was single, recently out of a long-term relationship, and working on Broadway. “I got this message from the stage doorman, Jerry, and he said, ‘This broad came here last night. Really good-looking broad, she left this note, and I had one of those weird thoughts, ‘If I open this note, it’s going to change my life.’ I literally had this premonition. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life.” And it did. He had just heard there was a no-show, so he rang Nicole and offered her the ticket. “We got together over that weekend – 1998, 26 years ago.”
He has previously said the secret to a happy relationship is separate bedrooms. Did he mean it? “That helps.” Why? “Because it means we’re independent. We’re not dependent on each other. I mean it’s very hard at the moment because we’re having to share a room, as I’ve got such a small flat in London. It’s weird. The place is such a fucking mess.” Normally, back home in America, they have a totally different set-up. “We visit each other.” Does he stay overnight if he visits? “Yeayeayea. The secret of a happy marriage is to allow the person to be the person and not make them into what you want to make them.”
I ask if he thinks about death. “Yes, all the time. I have a fantasy every night about how I’m going to die. I don’t think about it in a depressing way. I just think of all the possible scenarios.” What’s his favourite? “Going without fuss, wrapped up in bed with a cup of tea, maybe with the telly on.” I think you may have a long wait ahead of you, I say. “Maybe. Maybe.” I hope so.
It’s time to leave. We head off together. He talks about where I grew up in Manchester, the years he spent there working in the theatre, and the people and places he loves that I may know. Grumpy? No way. Sure, he’s passionate about a better world and pointing out all that’s bad in the present one. Yes, he’s a loudmouth with a penchant for roaring “Bollocks” at the world’s shysters and hypocrites. But, whisper it, Brian Cox may just be one of life’s great enthusiasts.
• The Score is at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London from 20 February to 26 April 2025, trh.co.uk
• This article was amended on 7 December 2024. The Score is being directed by Trevor Nunn, not Brian Cox as stated in an earlier version.
