Brian Cox isn’t short of a few quid. Decades of performing for stage, TV and film, including Hollywood hits Braveheart, The Bourne Supremacy, X-Men 2 and, not least, as the tyrannical Logan Roy in HBO’s Succession, brings with it a level of wealth, comfort and security. Why, then, unlike many of his peers, does the Scottish actor seem so intent on delivering scathing critiques of our politicians and their failure to tackle poverty, inequality and injustice? “Because I carry the memories of my mother, who went through a very hard time at the death of my father,” he tells me.
Cox was eight when his father, a grocer, died of pancreatic cancer. He describes him as “an exceptionally good man, but he was generous to a fault”. Coming out of the Second World War with £28,000, “a lot of money in those days”, Cox’s father invested and helped local people start businesses. “But he ended up being at the mercy of some very crooked lawyers. He was taken advantage of. When he died, he had ten quid in the bank.”
As a consequence, Cox’s mother had a nervous breakdown, and spent much of Cox’s later childhood absent and in hospital. “I lived in poverty—we had nothing,” he says. “I just got on with it. But that’s what lives with me daily and why I believe in what I believe in.”
Cox believes it’s even more difficult today for people from underprivileged backgrounds to make it in the arts: “The avenues are getting narrower and narrower.” Born in Dundee, he came up through the theatre, garnering acclaim for playing the title roles in King Lear and Titus Andronicus with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has taken on historical characters, from Winston Churchill in the film Churchill to a recent stint as Johann Sebastian Bach in London’s West End. Along the way, he’s won two Olivier Awards, an Emmy and a Golden Globe.
Succession—about a family fighting to inherit control of their father’s Murdoch-esque media empire—was a late career high. For all the “fuck offs” and tirades, drug addiction, squabbling and backstabbing, what did the series ultimately say about the state of the world? “Nobody is entitled,” Cox suggests. “I’ve got great sympathy for Logan Roy. He’s a self-made man. He wants some members of his family to take over. He hasn’t looked at his children long enough and he’s finally looking at them now, when he’s in his 80s. His children feel they’re entitled. That is the cancer that lies at the root of all that kind of pursuit.”
Though they’re obscenely wealthy, there’s an emptiness to the family’s lives and relationships. “Logan says, ‘You are not serious people’—that was the truest thing that was said in the whole show. Logan built this empire up. His children are only prepared to take. That’s where the capitalist society goes wrong, as it’s all about taking and not about giving.”
Cox will play another historical figure next: Adam Smith, in writer James Graham’s (Sherwood) new satirical play about the Royal Bank of Scotland’s role in the 2008 financial crash. The play previews at the Dundee Rep Theatre from 18th to 26th July ahead of a run at the Festival Theatre from 30th July to 9th August as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Cox will appear opposite Sandy Grierson’s Fred “The Shred” Goodwin, CEO at the time of RBS’s dramatic fall, which led to a £45.5bn bailout from the UK government. “Adam Smith comes back as a spirit and lays into them a bit,” Cox chuckles.
Smith argued for laissez-faire economics and free markets, with minimal government interference and regulation. But those ideas have been allowed to rampage out of control, Cox suggests. “What Smith didn’t allow for, because he’s part of the 18th century and part of the Great Enlightenment, was that men were going to become less enlightened. People have taken unfair advantage of the idea. Smith was trying to get a fairer economy. He would look at the state of the world now and be absolutely appalled.”
Like Succession, Make It Happen suggests that the world is not being run by the greatest human beings. Cox agrees. “It’s all got way out of hand. Look at what’s happening with Trump and this notion of ‘the deal’. I find ‘the deal’ really obscene, personally. It’s not about a deal—it’s about badgering. Ukraine has now given up certain parts of their land in order to make this deal with America. There’s no act of charity, or saying ‘The Russians are behaving in an appalling way and we should back up Ukraine.’ Trump’s not wrong that Europe has depended too much on the ‘big brother’. But he’s just… aggressively horrible.”
In terms of UK politics, Cox was a longstanding Labour supporter, but he quit to join the Scottish National Party (SNP) in 2015. He campaigned in favour of Scottish independence. “The previous UK government was pretty horrible,” he says. “I don’t think this government will be any better, as Keir Starmer is a Little Englander.” Many of his core political concerns seem to go back to his childhood years. “No one does anything about poverty. Child poverty has gone through the roof. It’s just appalling.”
