From the top floor of a flat in Primrose Hill, Brian Cox can be seen picking his way along the edge of the park. This flat belongs to a PR boss in charge of Cox’s new project, but Cox lives nearby. He disappears from view, and somewhere far below, a door slams. When he arrives at the top of the house, a bit out of breath, he points out his new place: the one with scaffolding. Cox, married to the actor Nicole Ansari-Cox with whom he’s performed on stage, has long spoken of separate rooms as the secret to a happy marriage, but now there are separate flats too. “She’s heading towards minimalism. So I said, ‘Good luck!’” Ansari-Cox lives across the park, which is an uphill walk. “So she’ll be visiting me – occasionally! Ha ha ha!”
Famous for playing the raging and the blustering, Cox has, since his Golden Globe for his role as the media monster Logan Roy in Succession, been involved in a strange blurring of life and art in the cafés of Primrose Hill. He has been seen pouring soup down a sink when it didn’t meet his expectations (“This is shit!”). Was this the real Cox, or the method acting he regularly decries? “I used to swear a bit, but now I swear all the time.”
Like Ian McKellen after he played Gandalf the Grey, Cox is a serious Shakespearean thesp who shot from the I-know-your-face-but-I’m-not-sure-where-from level of fame to getting mobbed in the street in his seventies: quite a psychological transition. But unlike McKellen, Cox gets asked not for selfies but to shout “fuck off” (like Logan Roy) into strangers’ phones. In 2019, he found himself at a reading of Ronan Farrow’s Harvey Weinstein book, Catch and Kill, in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. “So there I am, watching this extraordinary investigative journalism, this #MeToo thing, unfolding, and it finishes and we give him a round of applause. A lot of Hollywood ladies are there, and they turn round and see me, and they take out their phones and they go, “Can you tell us to fuck off?” I go, “You’re asking a white dinosaur to tell you to fuck off? This is why we’re unevolved, because we don’t know what the fuck we want!”
Yet there is a moral code behind Cox’s choice of raging bastards. He wouldn’t play Donald Trump. “Never. It’s a bad part. You look for characters who have some redeeming qualities. Well, I can’t be arsed in somebody I have no respect for whatsoever.” He wouldn’t play Nigel Farage either: “Can’t stand the man… Can’t bear the sound of his voice, and that mouth!”
Is there a danger in digging for virtue in the lives of the bad? What use is deep character work when those characters do disastrous work in the outside world?
“My great thing is I love babies,” Cox says. “I love toddlers, toddling about. I look at them and I go, ‘What happens? What do we do to these creatures? How do they become Adolf Hitler?’ If you went into one of those baby things where they’re all in different slots [he means a maternity ward with babies in different beds], you couldn’t say, ‘That baby’s Donald Trump and that one’s Marilyn Monroe.’ I find it extraordinary, what we do to children. You should be looking after them, showing them positive nature. We’re not evolved as human beings… We’re so stupid, and that’s when we see our stupidity at work – this shift towards the right.”
Cox and his family lived seven to a two-bed flat in Dundee. His beloved father died when Brian was eight: his mother, a jute spinner, had a series of nervous breakdowns afterwards, receiving electroshock therapy, and he was raised by his three sisters.
“I had the worst fucking childhood of anybody I know, and I turned out OK!” he says. Then he is back on the problem of humans. “It’s one of the tragedies of life that we come into this great world thinking the best of thoughts, and then we end up compromised beings. We have to be compromised, because we live in a world with other people. And I can be pretty misanthropic about other people – especially in Primrose Hill on a Sunday!”
I’m interviewing Cox because he’s playing the Scottish economist Adam Smith in a new James Graham play called Make It Happen, all about the 2008 financial crisis and Fred “the Shred” Goodwin, whose extravagant tenure as CEO of RBS led to Gordon Brown’s government bailing out the bank in 2008. He just got the script this morning. He decribes the banker he’ll be playing as “really quite a horrible character, an appalling man. Mind you, he was from Paisley, ha ha ha!”
Cox suggested the part of Smith to Graham: that he would to appear as a ghost, Jacob Marley-style. Cox recently spoke at Gordon Brown’s Adam Smith Centre in Kirkaldy, a global foundation set up, Brown told me, “in an attempt to rescue Smith from being co-opted by neoliberal zealots”.
“He gets a bad rap for stuff,” agrees Cox. “He was an extraordinary man. I said to James, it would be interesting if Adam Smith suddenly came back in 2008 and said, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’” So my first line is, “What the fuck is going on?” And then I say, “What is this word, ‘fuck’? I don’t understand this word. Why am I saying it?”
Gordon Brown features in the play. “He’s a very upright man, the best kind of Protestant,” Cox says. Cox’s transatlantic burr was the voice of New Labour in the 1997 election. “Well, I did a lot of voiceovers,” he says. “And I am – still am – a socialist.”
He never thought Corbyn was fit for leader, and as for Starmer, “I just can’t take the man at all! I was on a panel with him – Question Time, with Mary Robinson, the [former] president of Ireland, and that MP, Christopher Grayling, who was a bit of an idiot and got in trouble over expenses but was actually rather sweet. Starmer was there with some lackey, and he never exchanged a word with any of us! It was all about presentation. And he talks about England all the time! ‘English, the English football’. You’re the Prime Minister of Great Britain!”
Cox was known to have pledged his allegiance to the Scottish National Party, and was friends with Alex Salmond, but he feels differently now.
“My view now is that I hate the word nationalist. I don’t like the idea of the Scottish National Party, the connotations of that – but I liked the party itself. It used to be a ridiculous party about socks and kilts, and that’s all gone out the window, thank God. I used to mock Sean Connery: ‘You cannae be President Sir Sean Connery, it’s not gonna work!’
“Now, I believe that we should have federal representation. Look at the British Isles – you can’t really break them up, they’re such a cluster, there in the Atlantic, away from everything else. You’ve got to accept that we have to get on together. We need a federal society where everybody is responsible to the British Isles. That’s my new thing now. I’m not into parties that want to separate off. We need to find a way to make Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland part of a federal Britain. Wales gets the tap end of the bath every time.”
Cox loves stitching. Not tapestries and needlework but darning his own stuff. He recently found that his Scottish ancestors came from Burntisland, a town in Fife known for its weavers. But a DNA test showed that only 12 per cent of him is Scottish, and all the rest Irish: “So I’m 100 per cent Celt. I’m pure in that way.”
He was not turned on to acting by the thrill of being on stage, but by the enormous sense of “calm” he felt at being pulled, as a young boy, out of bed to perform for his dad’s friends on Hogmanay. “I remember the atmosphere in the room: this sort of focus. Human beings are so extraordinary when they’re in a congregation.”
When his father died, the family fell into debt, partly because Charles Cox, a shopkeeper, had served so many of the local community on credit. “I had to be independent from the age of nine, which I actually loved. I don’t depend on anything: if it happens, it happens, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. When you have that kind of loss and subsequent poverty, you go, ‘Oh, well, that’s it.’”
Now, like many who began in poverty, he enjoys his money. Unlike his wife, he is maximalist. He has a big Japanese art collection: “There’s not a part of the wall that’s not covered in paintings.” And he loves the vibrant American painter Bob Kane (“not the Bob Kane who wrote Superman”).
He raises the subject of method acting, which is interesting as he has already generated a lot of headlines slagging off Jeremy Strong, his co-star in Succession, who adheres to the process, and fractured his foot running in the wrong shoes for his art. Cox’s objection is that people can go off into their own little world when they do it, and damage the ensemble: “It’s really an act of selfishness.” He is steeped in theatre theory, and delivers a long anecdote about Strasberg and Stanislavski.
If it’s not method acting Cox does, then what is it?
“I just try to learn my lines and not bump into the furniture.”
In fact, his approach comes in part from the influence of his personal guru at Lamda, the director Vivian Matalon, who was a student of the Meisner technique. Sanford Meisner was all about intention. “That’s what feeds me as an actor. Why are you on the stage? What are you doing? Why does he react to that? What is it that makes him go that way as opposed to that way? Those are the important questions. Not about ‘What am I feeling?’. It’s not about what you’re feeling. It’s what you do that creates what you feel.”
So how has he applied the Meisner technique to the life of the great economist Adam Smith?
“Well, I haven’t done it yet.”
Brian Cox will appear in “Make It Happen” at the Dundee Rep Theatre, 18-26 July 2025, and the Edinburgh International Festival, 30 July – 9 August 2025
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This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord