Brian Cox gave an interview to The Times of London this week to promote his directorial debut Glenrothan, and by the time it was over he had lit up Ian McKellen, Edward Norton, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Strong, Quentin Tarantino, Johnny Depp, Margot Robbie, Michael Caton-Jones, playwright David Hare, Donald Trump, and America itself. He is turning 80 this year. He is done being careful.
On Ian McKellen, with whom he starred in the 2003 X-Men sequel X2, Cox was clipped and precise. His acting is “not to my taste.” Four words. No elaboration.
For context, Cox called Edward Norton “a pain in the arse” and Kevin Spacey “a stupid, stupid man,” which means McKellen got off relatively lightly in terms of word count.
But “not to my taste,” delivered about one of the most celebrated stage and screen actors in the history of British theatre, carries its own specific weight. It is a dismissal, not an attack.
The Full List Of Celebrites Trashed By Cox
Cox did not stop at McKellen. The interview was comprehensive.
When speaking about Johnny Depp, Cox said the actor is “so overblown, so overrated.”
Cox confirmed he turned down a role in Pirates of the Caribbean, specifically Jonathan Pryce’s role as the governor, and was relieved to have done so.
He made headlines with this assessment in his 2022 memoir Putting the Rabbit in the Hat and later said he regretted it, acknowledging he “went for the easy joke.” This week he went for it again.
Edward Norton, his 25th Hour co-star, “a pain in the arse.”
Cox said about Kevin Spacey, “a great talent, but a stupid, stupid man.”
On Quentin Tarantino, Cox said, “meretricious.” For those who want the dictionary, meretricious means apparently attractive but having no real value or integrity.
Cox elaborated on the directorial side of his critique, “I’m more egalitarian than a lot of directors, the kind who call themselves visionaries. I like to honor the actor’s performance. With a Quentin Tarantino film, what you see is all Quentin Tarantino. That’s not me. I don’t want to do that.”
Director Michael Caton-Jones was referred to as “a complete arsehole.”
Playwright David Hare was called something unprintable that rhymes with “see you next Tuesday.”
Margot Robbie was deemed “far too beautiful” for the role she plays in Wuthering Heights, with Cox also taking issue with her accent in the film.
Cox then turned his attention to the President of the United States, saying, “Trump doesn’t give a shit about the people. He’s only interested in the oil. There’s just sheer fucking greed motivating him, nothing else. The idea he’s liberating people is a nonsense.”
On America itself, Cox said,
“In America they don’t like women. They won’t let a woman be president, not in the foreseeable future. Look what happened to Hillary Clinton. The patriarchy is so invasive and so insidious, it’s hard to throw it off. I think the patriarchy is a fucking mess, and it’s the patriarchy that got us into the position that we’re in at the moment, and we don’t learn the lessons. I say, give it over to the women.”
The Jeremy Strong Situation
Cox has been publicly critical of Jeremy Strong’s Method acting for years, regularly citing him as the prime exhibit in his case against what Cox considers an unnecessarily tortured approach to the craft.
Strong played Kendall Roy to Cox’s Logan Roy across four seasons of Succession. The relationship was both professionally extraordinary and, apparently, personally wearing.
In the Times interview, Cox revealed that Strong has personally asked him to stop. “I’ve got into a lot of problems and he’s begged me to stop talking about him,” Cox said.
He then softened slightly, “He’s a good actor, Jeremy. He’s a wonderful actor. It’s just all the bollocks that goes with it. You watch children, they don’t say, ‘What’s my motivation?’ They just do it!”
The backstory involves Daniel Day-Lewis, who entered the dispute last year after Cox connected Strong’s approach to his former work as Day-Lewis’ assistant.
Day-Lewis responded in the UK’s Big Issue, saying Cox had been given “a soapbox which he shows no sign of climbing down from” and adding, “Any time he wants to talk about it, I’m easy to find.”
Asked in this week’s interview whether he had reached out to Day-Lewis since, Cox said, “No, I haven’t reached out because it’s got nothing to do with Dan Day-Lewis. Dan Day-Lewis, he’s discreet. He never upsets the filming process.”
The Gary Oldman Churchill Footnote
One of the more interesting threads in the interview involves the 2017 awards season, when Gary Oldman won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour.
Cox played Churchill the same year in the biopic Churchill, a film that received considerably less attention and no Oscar nomination.
Cox’s feelings about this particular overlap were not spelled out explicitly in the excerpts published, but his willingness to raise it in this interview says something about the way it landed.
Why Was Cox Talking Trash?
His wife, he acknowledges, is not thrilled. “My wife keeps saying, ‘Brian, be careful. Brian, be careful.'”
His response, which he described to The Times, has become the most quoted line from the entire interview, “I think, ‘F–k it, I don’t want to be careful anymore! I’ll be 80 this year. F–k it! I’m gonna say what I want to say.'”
Brian Cox was born June 1, 1946, in Dundee, Scotland. He trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, spent decades as one of the most respected classical stage actors in Britain, and broke through to mainstream global audiences as Logan Roy in Succession, a role he played from 2018 to 2023.
He is widely credited with helping establish the show’s tone and moral universe. He has been nominated for Golden Globes, Emmys, SAG Awards, and BAFTA throughout his career.
He is currently promoting Glenrothan, his directorial debut, which takes its name from the Scottish town he is from.
That is the film he was meant to be discussing. Instead, he produced one of the most entertaining celebrity interview eruptions of the year. His wife is probably exhausted. The rest of us are grateful.
