HBO's hit series Succession: Nothing succeeds like swearing

Brian Cox in a scene from Succession, the satirical comedy-drama television series created by Jesse Armstrong. Photo / supplied

It's unconventional, yes, but entirely fitting that a day of filming on the set of Succession, HBO's hit series about a media tycoon and his dysfunctional family, starts with an all-cast curse-off, the actors improvising expletives to get themselves into vicious, competitive, bile-filled character.

And I fancy that Brian Cox, the 73 year-old Dundee-born actor who heads up the cannibalistic clan (whose cast includes Matthew Macfadyen, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong), is probably rather good at it.

It's nothing in his disposition - he is as twinklingly charming as they come.
But just seconds into our conversation, he's already conjuring colourful insults galore: "Someone asked the other day: 'Would you play Trump?' and I said, 'No, it's a bad part, it's a bad script,' " he regales. "The man's so two-dimensional. He's about as deep as a blackhead."

Cox, who has lived largely in New York for the past 12 years, has dual nationality and is still closely engaged with politics on both sides of the Atlantic.

"If he gets in again, I'm out of here," he says, unequivocally, of Trump. I want to read out a list of public figures who have disappointed me recently, just to hear Cox cheerfully tear them to pieces in his gravelly tones.

If only all Hollywood actors were this delightfully unfiltered. And Cox, these days, is very firmly "Hollywood".

Though he has spent five decades in British theatre - winning an Olivier award for his 1988 Titus Andronicus with the RSC - and television and film, securing an Emmy for his portrayal of Hermann Göring in Nuremberg in 2000, Succession has propelled him into a different category.

In the savagely satirical drama, Cox's Logan Roy is an irascible, unpredictable, self-made media tycoon with four obnoxiously entitled offspring, each of whom believes they should inherit his crown - stabbing one another continuously in both the back and front - but all of whom Roy regards as ill-equipped for the job.

The character is frequently compared to media barons such as Rupert Murdoch but has, after two wildly popular and critically acclaimed seasons, also become a cultural touchstone in his own right.

"He's become a kind of iconic character," nods Cox, beaming. Indeed, pre-lockdown, fervent fans of the show would frequently beg him to tell them to "f--- off" in the distinctive Logan Roy style. He's happy to oblige, clearly revelling in the role.

"I've been in this business for a very long time, and it's the most exciting television I've ever done," he enthuses.

Filming on the much-anticipated third season was due to begin in April, and though no date has been set since that plan was put on ice thanks to Covid-19, Cox says "there are plans being laid to get stuff going".

Jesse Armstrong, the show's creator, has told him the arc of the season. "I think it's even more extraordinary than season two," he says.

In the meantime, however, he's holed up in his country house in bucolic upstate New York with his wife of 18 years, Nicole Ansari, and their two "giant teenage sons", Orson, 18, and Torin, 15 (he also has two older children, Margaret and Alan, from his first marriage).

He spins the camera around to give me the wooded panorama from the cabin, ordinarily rented out as an Airbnb but now repurposed as his studio while they all live over in the main house.

It's here that he has been plugging away at lockdown projects, including Little Room, an eight-part show filmed remotely, about a leading psychiatrist (Mariella Frostrup, making an acting cameo) who has disappeared, leaving the members of her agoraphobic support group desperate to discover her whereabouts.

Cox plays Robert, a Falklands War veteran. "He's quite happy in his agoraphobia, and he paints, and he has this relationship with his psychiatrist which is very cursory," says Cox.

He was brought in by the producer Maggie Montieth, a fellow Scot, who came up with the idea as a way of raising money for freelancers in the hard-hit entertainment industry - the fee to watch the series goes to the British-based Film and TV Charity and America's Motion Picture and Television Fund.

The actor Brian Cox. Photo/ supplied

Cox himself grew up in almost Dickensian poverty, the youngest of five by some considerable gap. His father died when he was eight and his mother, a cleaner, suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, and was treated with electric shock therapy, from which she never fully recovered.

When her pension ran out and the family found itself struggling to afford food, Cox used to ask for the leftover scraps of batter from the local chippy for the family's dinner.

"I survived on nothing when I was a child," he says. He left school at 15, to mop floors at Dundee repertory theatre, but there found a sense of place.
"I learnt from great teachers and mentors and people who gave me a value system," he says.

At 17, he won a scholarship to attend Lamda, "and, like a young tree, I was able to blossom", he says. By his early twenties, he was performing at the Royal Court alongside other working-class actors who had served as his inspiration, such as Albert Finney.

"I can't begrudge what's been happening at Eton and Harrow, where they have these state-of-the-art theatres and all these failed actors working as teachers," he says, with a devilish chuckle.

"But I do begrudge the fact that for someone like me, now [because of cuts to drama in schools and to tuition-fee bursaries] it's impossible to make that contact with the arts that I was able to.

"It was the Swinging Sixties, it was the King's Road," he recalls of his coming of age in the capital.

But not for Cox the hippy hijinks of his peers. "I'd had crazy times as a child and I really didn't need craziness. I needed order, I needed discipline. So I got married when I was 21, because it was all too much."

He was a father by the age of 24, but parenting, he admits, does not come naturally to him.

"I'm hopeless at homework, because I never did any, and my wife keeps saying: 'You've got to set boundaries.' I have no idea what a boundary is - I had no boundaries. So I find the whole parenting thing really very confusing."

Still, I say, he's always got Logan to look to as a barometer of really bad fathering. What, if anything, do they share?

"I think we both feel that the human experiment is rather disappointing," he smiles. "He's completely misanthropic, whereas I am an optimistic misanthrope. But I'm horrified at the stupidity of people."

As we're saying our goodbyes, he seems so game and so enthusiastic about his role as Logan that I break my own very strict code, cave in and ask him for a favour.It's a close friend's birthday the next day; would he wish Jason a happy birthday, then tell him to "F--- off", please? He would, he does, and it really is thrilling.

* Seasons one and two of Succession are available to view in New Zealand on Neon and Sky Go.