Brian Cox (‘Succession’) on playing the ‘incredibly flawed’ Logan Roy [Complete Interview Transcript]
Brian Cox plays media conglomerate tycoon Logan Roy in the HBO series “Succession,” a man hoping to figure out who is next in line from his family to take over the organization. Cox previously won an Emmy for his role in the 2000 miniseries “Nuremberg.”
Cox recently spoke with Gold Derby contributing writer Charles Bright about how “Succession” is a morality tale, his feelings on fellow tycoon Rupert Murdoch and the changing origin story of Logan Roy. Watch the exclusive webchat above and read the complete interview transcript below.
Gold Derby: What’s the most dastardly thing your character did during the first season? Please dish, Brian.
Brian Cox: There’s so many. It’s very hard to choose (laughs). It’s a very interesting role, Logan, because people ask me these questions and, of course, I don’t think in these terms. I think as Logan needs must protect the company, protect the family, protect the firm. So in a sense, he does a series of things in order to do that, in order to present his company, himself and his legacy. So in a way, it’s very hard to say. If you ask Logan Roy, he would not know what the most dastardly thing is he did because he just does a sequence of them. It’s all about the protection of his entity. Logan is actually, in many ways, quite private. He’s a private man and he has a background which is slightly mysterious. We know he was born in Scotland. We know he came to Canada at a very young age. We know that he went to back to Scotland to work in the newspapers and basically he’s a newspaperman. And then he became this tycoon. But unlike a Murdoch, he’s self-made. He doesn’t come from anything other than what he’s created himself and he’s moved in a right direction, obviously, because he’s sort of iconoclast but he’s an individualist. He believes primarily in individualism. The difficulty that he has is with his children because they’ve not had the life that he’s had. They had the life of entitlement. It’s very difficult to sort that one out, the whole thing of entitlement in relationship to the kids.
He’s constantly challenging them in order to strengthen them because they’ve got to be worthy of taking over this position. At the moment, they’re not worthy and they’re constantly being challenged by their father in order to see their value and to see what they can offer to Waystar Co. It’s an old-fashioned fiefdom. He believes in that because he’s created it. He does love his children but he’s very hard on them because of the business. It’s very hard to say, “What is the most dastardly thing he does,” because he doesn’t think in those terms. It’s a needs must situation constantly. That’s the story of his life. He’s had to make these adjustments throughout his whole life in order to create the empire that he’s created, and in a way that’s very Shakespearean. It’s very much like “King Lear.” It’s very much like those characters that we see who have dedicated themselves to a kind of vision of what they’re doing. “John Gabriel Borkman” and [Henrik] Ibsen’s plays, “The Master Builder,” a great source to look at. And then, from modern history, and certainly today… That’s why I think I really do believe this is a morality tale because it’s about the consequences of this fundamental disconnect between what your roots and what your core value is, to something else. These kids are very disconnected because of their position and he thinks only by budging them up the ass will he reconnect them again and by giving them these challenges. That’s what makes it very difficult. We’ll find that each season deals with one particular child at a time in order to see where the succession will lie. It’s challenging for everybody and it’s also challenging for Logan because he does love his children but he has very little patience for them.
GD: One of the other things that is so distinct about the show is the way that it balances the dramatic and also very comedic aspects of everything there. It’s a very fine line it walks but it walks it very well. Do you find yourself more drawn to the dramatic aspects or the comedic aspects or both equally?
BC: Both equally. You have to keep that balance. It’s almost a payoff of his malcontent. He suddenly will payoff with one of those malcontent lines which are quite withering. There’s always a challenge every time you come to it. He’s dealing with his own sense of longevity. How long has he got? What does it all add up to? He’s on a big ski run in that way himself, dealing with his own mortality. Also, the other thing from the writers’ point of view is it is a document of the day, about how people are living today and the whole thing about the disconnect that the rich has from their society and how they try to run it. In that way, it’s quite brilliant. It is like being in a Chaucerian morality play. You really look at it from that point of view. It presents a lot of challenges to the actor but at the same time, there is a classical structure to it. This is the tale of Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, the iron will trying to deal with something which is unfathomable and creates all kinds of havoc. Even in the second season, he does have this with his children though he becomes quite protective. I won’t say who, but he does become quite protective of one of his children because he realizes that that particular child has been pushed too far in one direction. So there’s a sense that reclamation has to go on. It’s very funny, I saw “Network” the other day.
GD: I love that movie.
BC: Yeah, it’s a great movie. It’s not such a great play because the balance is wrong. The movie is wonderfully balanced, Bill Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch. There’s a balance. It’s a truly wonderful performance by Bryan Cranston. He’s quite extraordinary, but the play creaks because an old-fashioned morality is coming into play, ’50s, ’60s morality. It’s strong morality of somebody like [Paddy] Chayefsky who was quite moral but the drama is a little (grunts) now. Nowadays, everything moves in parallels and the algorithms are all spread out. It’s less linear. The great thing about television, the great thing about this kind of television now, is the long form of television has completely altered drama. We don’t have the beginning, middle and end like they have in most movies or most plays. There’s a first act, second act and third act. That doesn’t happen in television because the second act is ongoing. It’s always a first act and second act and it’s endless because of what you’re dealing with in terms of the personalities, in terms of the story, in terms of how the story develops, where the story can go to. So the possibilities are also quite endless.
GD: You mentioned that Logan is from Scotland. You’re from Scotland as well, which is part of the U.K. At least for now. I don’t know how that’s going to age, but we’ll see. The U.K., after Australia, is where Murdoch, who part of the show is based on, really came to prominence with his empire.
BC: “The Times”, “The Sun,” the other one, the one they dropped. What was it called?
GD: It wasn’t “Daily Mail,” was it?
BC: No, not the “Daily Mail.” It was the other one, “News of the World.” It’s very interesting because there’s a funny story about that. When I was asked to play it originally, I said, “I’d quite like to play this as a Scot,” and they said, “Oh, no, no, no. He has to be American. He’s got to be North American of some kind.” So I said, “Okay, fine.” I played more Americans than I actually played British people, funnily enough. So I said, “Okay, fine. I’ll do that.” We did the first episode and it said, “He was born in Quebec, Canada.” I thought, “Okay, he’s a Canadian-American, he’s got all kinds of things influencing, British, American, what have you.” So they were happy and suddenly in the ninth episode, Peter Friedman, who’s wonderful, plays Frank, he comes up to me and he said, “Brian, they just called me in to do some ADR. I’ve just done some ADR.” And I said, “Yeah?” He said, “Yeah, they’ve changed your birthplace.” I said, “What?” He said, “They changed your birthplace.” I said, “Well, what do you mean they’ve changed it?” He said, “Well you’re no longer born in Quebec. You’re born in I can’t remember.” So he looked at his device and he went, “Oh, here we are, Dundee, Scotland.” And I went, “That’s bizarre. That is so bizarre.” So I thought it was astonishing that they made this change. He’s clearly American-influenced. He’s clearly spent most of his life living here, apart from perhaps when he went back to Scotland as a young man. It figures in my hometown we have the Thomson Press, which are quite famous in Britain. There’s a paper called “The Courier.” There’s also a paper called the “Sunday Post,” which millions of Scots read. It’s one of the biggest selling papers in the world. We talked it through and actually one of the episodes, it’s a Logathon, where I’m going back to Dundee to play Logan Roy, I’m going to the new V&A and he’s being celebrated as one of Dundee’s favorite sons. I’m also going back to Dundee because it was almost 60 years ago that I started in the theater in Dundee and that theater is undergoing its 80th anniversary. So I’d got to go back and present “An Evening with Brian Cox.” It’s a strange thing going home between Logan Roy and Brian Cox. It’s most bizarre.
GD: I was wondering, actually, having lived in the U.K., being from the U.K. and having seen Murdoch’s influence up close and now getting to play this character, did you gain any sort of appreciation or sympathy for what Rupert Murdoch or his family have gone through while making this show?
BC: It’s, again, strange. That article that came out recently about the Murdochs. I don’t know if you read that in “The New York Times.”
GD: I read the first part of that, yeah.
BC: That’s exposed a lot. The fact that they had therapy and our family has therapy… It was not known about, the therapy, though our clever writer had found out about it. Clearly, there is a family that are examining who they are. I’ve always been particularly obsessed in my life with Andrew Carnegie, who is a fellow Scot. Carnegie’s a very interesting character because here was a man who was incredibly poor, who did become the richest man in the world, as J.P. Morgan said to him when he sold American steel to J.P. Morgan. He was plagued by the fact that he wanted his wealth to be a force for good and ultimately his wealth, when it came to the first World War, because of the steel and armaments and all that, he couldn’t unstitch himself from it. He tried to and it wouldn’t work. The moral imperative gets put on the back burner and as an artist, I see the danger in that. I see that if you put that on the back burner, everything goes belly-up. Everything turns to shit, quite frankly. Therefore, it is also the root of great tragedy. “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” putting everything off, those inevitabilities. Lear’s great line is, “I have taken too little care of this,” when he comes to a point where it’s all gone pear-shaped.
I think that’s what’s interesting about them. In a way, I have an empathy for that because they’ve set themselves on this path and it’s led them in a curious cul-de-sac, a familial cul-de-sac. It must be very hard and the one thing I did find out by sheer accident, I was in a restaurant, in a cafe in London, and this man came up to me and he was bearded and looked like an artist, terribly nice man, and he was saying how much he really enjoyed the series. And I said, “Thank you.” He said, “Yeah, but it is difficult for my wife. She finds it really difficult.” I said, “Oh, really?” He said, “Yeah, it is hard for her.” And I said, “So who’s your wife?” He said, “Elizabeth Murdoch.” I saw such a picture of the kind of exposure that was happening and how it would infringe on a life, on a couple, and I was just chastened by it because I saw that our job can be quite ruthless, what we do, but at the same time it’s also dealing with a sort of truth. The real truth is always much more complicated so you knew that there was something out of that. They’re by all accounts a very happily married couple. But it was interesting to me because I did feel responsible. But then I thought, “Well, that’s my job.” As Shakespeare says, “I have to hold the mirror up to nature.” That’s what I do. I present its own form. I don’t judge. I just present with empathy. I don’t sympathize, but I have to say there is a life that’s been traced out and you have to follow that tracing. You have to go through that and say, “This is the life, whether you like it or not.” I played a lot of people who are very questionable and sometimes I went, “I’m not sure whether I should be doing this,” like I played [Hermann] Goring, which I won an Emmy for. Goring was a fascinating character because he was a man who was in incredible denial but he was also rather a brilliant man and he was also the man who created Adolf Hitler. He was a man who saw this young Viennese boy, kind of eccentric, and he threw everything behind it and at the end of his time with Hitler, he always saw himself as a soldier. He was an airman. He believed in the Fuhrer. At the end of the war, he was sentenced to death. He was sentenced to death by Hitler. He came, did the Nuremberg trial and he wanted to die as a soldier. He wanted to be shot. He didn’t want to be hung. He felt hanging was ignominious. So somehow or other, the night before the hanging, he committed suicide by taking poison. That was quite fascinating to me.
Playing that, I began to understand, and what he did at Nuremberg, the worst thing they did for themselves was they took him off all his meds. He had clarity, he was clear, and he gave the historical argument for National Socialism, which was a legitimate argument. I could see what the argument was. Where it gets into a horrible area is when you talk about the Final Solution and what happened in the Holocaust, where it just went over the edge. That, in a way, is what’s quite fascinating about people like Logan Roy. They’re ultimately human beings but they’re incredibly flawed. It doesn’t go quite right. It goes in a strange thing. He just wanted a business and out of that business becomes monstrous. It’s very Shakespearean.
GD: It definitely is. Thanks very much, Brian Cox, and good luck at this year’s Emmys.