Brian Cox has never been one to mince his words and he clearly isn’t going to start now, as we meet during a break from rehearsals for a new play about Johann Sebastian Bach. “I was not a Bach fanatic,” he says of the baroque German composer. “I mean, all that jiggly-jiggly stuff.” What’s more, he has actually played Bach once before, back in the 1980s, in a TV film. “It was, shall we say, a bit dry.”
But having recently finished in a role that has made him quite possibly the world’s biggest TV star – the fiendish patriarch and merciless media mogul Logan Roy in Succession – Cox was keen to get his feet back on a stage. “I’m a glutton for terrible punishment,” he says. “I’m at a certain age now and I just wanted to know if I could still learn lines. And it has been difficult because we’ve done it in such a short period, with a play we are constantly changing, constantly cutting.”
The Score, by Oliver Cotton, investigates a particular moment in Bach’s life when – in his 60s, with 20 industrious years as director of church music and some sublime masses behind him – he was summoned from his home in Leipzig to the court of the Prussian king, Frederick the Great. His task? To improvise a fugue around a musical theme composed by the king himself.
The devout composer is taken aback by this brutal monarch, who shows no Christian concern about the violence his demobbed soldiers are unleashing on his citizens, yet is still capable of writing a haunting piece of music. So begins an inquiry into the origins of inspiration. “Bach describes it as this tiny, blurred, grey moment,” says Cox. “It’s the moment between want and action. When you want to do something and then you do it, what is it that you do?”
It’s an inquiry to which Cox himself has given much thought over the years. “I completely identify, because so much of what you do, you don’t know what you’re doing. But you know you’re driven by something.” Bach assumed it was divine inspiration. “I’m a humanist,” says Cox. “I feel we don’t acknowledge our own humanity nearly enough, because we’re so busy surrounding ourselves with belief systems, when none of them – Islam, Catholicism, Judaism or any other religion – clarify anything. They just make things more complicated.”
These rehearsals are taking place in a church in west London that smells strongly of incense. In the vestibule outside, congregants are busy arranging huge vases of flowers. Cox, who was brought up a Catholic, waves a hand towards the altar and says: “Really, the belief is in who we are, what we do, what we can do, what our possibility is, and how we can be integrated with one another. That’s what takes place in the church, and in the theatre, when people come together. There’s something that happens to them as a community. It is what Hamlet says: holding a mirror up to nature, showing people what our life is.”
This is not a thought one could imagine Logan Roy pursuing for long without arriving at one of his infamous “Fuck offs”. Cox gave such a towering performance in Succession that it is a surprise to find how small he is in person. He makes this point himself, joking that he recently played the famously tall US president Lyndon B Johnson on Broadway – and at 5ft 8in must be the smallest LBJ on record.
The death of Roy in the fourth series of Succession was the TV event of the year (at least until the finale a few weeks later). It was so discreetly done, in the bathroom of his PJ (private jet), that some fans wondered if he was really dead. If his funeral brought confirmation, it also gave them an unexpected treat. As the clans gathered in the church, a stranger slipped into the pew for Roy’s wives and mistresses.
It didn’t take long for social media to start humming with the intelligence that the actor was Nicole Ansari-Cox, the actor’s wife in real life. The couple didn’t overlap on set. “I wasn’t there because I was dead,” Cox deadpans. They do rather better in The Score, in which she plays Bach’s second wife, Anna, who was mother to 13 of his 20 children. The casting was the idea of director Trevor Nunn, who had cast them together before, in Tom Stoppard’s 2006 play Rock’n’Roll.
Such opportunities are the upside of a new celebrity that has left Cox with profoundly mixed feelings. It means being “papped” outside the flat the couple live in when they’re in London. “I’ve lost my anonymity,” he says mournfully, “and I’ve realised that that was what was important to me. I haven’t ever experienced anything like this. I mean, you ask for success in your work, and you get it, and then you have to deal with the consequences. I’ve always valued my privacy, but that’s gone. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve had it for so long. You know, I’ve been doing this for over 60 years. And finally it’s over.”
In his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, published two years ago, Cox describes Ansari-Cox as his soulmate. They met in Hamburg in 1990 when he was playing King Lear. She was so smitten, she saw it eight times. They got together properly eight years later and had two sons, but as a German Iranian in the wake of 9/11, she could only join him in the US on a tourist visa. It wasn’t until she landed a cameo in the western TV series Deadwood – in which Cox had a regular role as theatre impresario Jack Langrishe – that she managed to get a green card. They didn’t coincide on set there either, although his memoir states: “It was a very happy show. I was looking forward to coming back in season four … but then things fell apart, some kind of pissing contest, which meant the fourth series never happened.” He was approached to be in the film tie-in, but by then was committed to Succession.
As with so many actors, there is a whole phantom life in his list of near misses. “I’m often asked,” his memoir revealed, “if I was offered a role in Game of Thrones – reason being that every other bugger was – and the answer is, yes, I was supposed to be a king called Robert Baratheon.” He turned it down because the money wasn’t great and the character got killed off early. “There’s always been a tendency of American productions to treat British actors differently from American actors,” he grumbled. “In other words, to get them cheap.”
But it’s not just about money. He also rejected the part of the governor in Pirates of the Caribbean, a lucrative role that eventually went to Jonathan Pryce. Why? “It would have been a moneyspinner but, of all the parts in the film, it was the most thankless.” Also, he continues, it was very much the Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow show. “And Depp, personable though I’m sure he is, is so overblown – I mean Edward Scissorhands! Let’s face it, if you come on with hands like that and pale, scarred-face makeup, you don’t have to do anything. And he didn’t.”
None of these near misses, however, is quite as significant as the one he had in October 1965, as a 19-year-old actor in Scotland desperate to prove his chops on the London stage. He had been summoned for a meeting with Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, and had booked a night flight for after his evening show at the Edinburgh Lyceum. But when he arrived earlier that day at the Lyceum with his overnight bag, the stage doorman handed him a note cancelling the meeting because Olivier was indisposed. Cox awoke the next morning to learn that the plane had crashed at Heathrow, killing everyone on board.
“Well then,” said Olivier, his hero, when they finally met in London. “What the fuck are you doing here? Because I can tell you now that you’ll only understudy here.” Cox took himself off to Birmingham Rep, where he had been offered a string of roles, including the villain Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. His stint there established him as a versatile character actor, while also introducing him to Michael Gambon – who, as Othello, was continually trying to get him to corpse.
Starting with a demolition of Steven Seagal, with whom he worked on the 1996 film The Glimmer Man, Cox’s memoir is so fabulously outspoken that I wonder if he actually wrote or even read the book. Perhaps he simply nodded it through like so many celebrity autobiographers do? No, he says, it’s all his words, dictated for a ghostwriter who merely helped to organise them.
But if he is rude about others, he is also unstinting about himself, berating himself as an absent father and – until Nicole – an unfaithful husband. Just about the only flaw he doesn’t confess to is excessive drinking, to which many of his peers succumbed. He took his craft too seriously. He is also careful not to punch down, backtracking a couple of times during our interview over indiscretions about past productions, usually involving one of his pet hates: directors. Apparently Nicole is always telling him to be less outspoken. “I sometimes sound off a bit too much,” he says, somewhat needlessly.
On politics, however, the 77-year-old has no such qualms. Among the subjects he has recently “sounded off” about is the shrinking number of opportunities for working-class kids like him, who were once able to get grants to go to drama school. “But,” he says, “you’ve got to be balanced about it, you know. I’m very happy to be outspoken on politics because I think this country is in such a mess. It’s horrible that we have had these successive Tory governments based on selfishness and not community.”
He recently made a pair of documentaries for Channel 5 called How the Other Half Live. “Because I was playing Logan,” he says, “I decided I wanted to look into the nature of the wealth gap and see how things were going back in my home town.” He pauses and digresses: “But did I know Logan had a Dundonian background? No!” At first, Cox had been told Roy was American through and through, or at least north American: during the birthday party in the very first episode, we find out the tycoon was born in Quebec.
“So I’m doing my best mid-Atlantic American,” Cox recalls – and then came the ninth episode, when the clan assemble at a castle for Shiv and Tom’s wedding. “Peter Friedman, who plays Frank, who I constantly fire and rehire, said, ‘They’ve changed your birthplace.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, they’ve changed my birthplace?’ He said, ‘Well, you’re no longer born in Quebec.’ I said, ‘So where am I born?’ He said, ‘I can’t remember. Let me check. Oh, yeah. It’s somewhere called Dundee.’”
And so art imitated life. The Channel 5 documentaries took him back to the Dundee tenement where he had lived as a child with his parents and his four older siblings. Until his dad died, when he was eight, it was great – but then his mother went to pieces. “I remember him doing fireworks on top of the old air raid shelter among all these pristine lawns. And you know, there was no more difficult time than in the 50s, when people were back from the war and trying to readjust.”
How did it all look when he returned? “I just couldn’t believe the state of the place. And I saw one thing that I thought was quite revealing. Back then we were all tenants, but we all had our names on the door. It was the Brodys, the Coxes, the Patersons. Now you go and there’s no name. It’s just 1, 2, 3. People have become numbers. The depersonalisation is a way of controlling them – and they don’t even realise. I think that’s at the root of what we are now struggling with. Dundee has a huge heroin problem, of course, but it’s also to do with poverty. It’s to do with people not being taken care of. I think that’s where we’re very guilty.”
Next year, Cox will return to Scotland to direct his first feature film, Glenrothan, set in a whisky distillery. He will also play one of the leads. “I was supposed to do it this year, he says. “But it just became overwhelmingly difficult because I was exhausted.” Although he doubts he will ever live in Scotland again, he insists he “certainly will be buried there. That much I know.”
His main home is in New York but he keeps a foothold in London, because it’s where his son and daughter from his previous marriage live. “And,” he adds, “because London represents freedom to me. When I came to London as a student in the 1960s, it was that period of incredible social mobility. And everybody who was alive at the time knows how phenomenal that was.”
He doesn’t consider himself to be British, “because the United Kingdom doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a United Kingdom and never was a United Kingdom.” It should be remodelled, he believes, as a United Federation: “A group of countries in the EU that come together to do things on behalf of one another. That’s a different system. And it’s a system we really need to look at. It’s the way we will progress – by giving each country its autonomy.”
Given the strength of his opinions, has he ever considered going into politics? “I doubt if I’d ever stand for office because I will always be the dissenter. My thing is to ask the questions. I don’t want to be trying to deliver horrible answers. And anyway, I don’t think of myself as a political animal. I just think in terms of fairness, of justice.”
This thought brings him back to the importance of community, his love of film and theatre – and the music of Bach, which he has realised, through the communal activity of rehearsal, he does like after all. “There’s absolutely nothing more joyous than sharing,” he says. “I just think we’ve undervalued that so much.”
And with that he’s off to prise the latest version of the script off Cotton and Nunn, muttering dark oaths about having to spend the weekend learning his lines all over again.
• The Score is at the Theatre Royal Bath until 28 October
