Brian Cox is a classically trained Shakespearean actor, a great Scotsman, and, at 77 years old, a formidable star of stage and screen with an estimable career spanning more than six decades. But he is, first and foremost, a hater. Or, should I say, a hateur.
Most people in the entertainment industry are terrified of saying the wrong thing publicly. Cox, on the other hand, seems to go into interviews armed with a scroll of grievances. For lovers of hate, it’s refreshing. Cox was on a heater during his five-year run as ornery patriarch Logan Roy on Succession, and the fact that his IRL hating was on par with Roy’s made it all the more delightful. (These similarities shouldn’t be confused with Method acting, which Brian Cox hates.)
My colleague Frazier Tharpe recently dubbed 2024 “the year of the hater.” Cox—who’s been letting it rip so freely during his press tour for a West End production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night that he seems one interview away from dropping his own Drake diss track—is only adding to the vibe. In honor of a true hater, let’s reflect on every actor, politician, place, and general concept on which Brian Cox has hated.
In early 2022, Cox released a memoir titled Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. (Slake your thirst for hate with an excerpt here.) For celebrities, especially august ones, a memoir is an opportunity to share some salacious stories, fire some shots or, at least, drop some bitchy bon mots. Cox delivers. In the prologue alone, he says Steven Seagal is "as ludicrous in real life as he appears onscreen” and diagnoses him with the "Donald Trump syndrome of thinking himself far more capable and talented than he actually is, seemingly oblivious to the fact that an army of people are helping to prop up his delusion."
Why wasn’t Brian Cox in Pirates of the Caribbean? Well, you’ll get to that in the memoir, by way of some insults about Johnny Depp. “Another thing with Pirates of the Caribbean is that it’s very much the ‘Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow’ show, and Depp, personable though I’m sure he is, is so overblown, so overrated,” Cox writes. “I mean, Edward Scissorhands. Let’s face it, if you come on with hands like that and pale, scarred-face make-up, you don’t have to do anything. And he didn’t. And subsequently, he’s done even less. But people love him. Or they did love him. They don’t love him so much these days, of course.”
QT also gets a share of Cox’s ire. “The trouble is, I really don’t have much time for Quentin Tarantino. I find his work meretricious. It’s all surface. Plot mechanics in place of depth. Style where there should be substance,” he writes. “I walked out of Pulp Fiction. I gritted my teeth and sat through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and although it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, it still wasn’t good enough to convert me. Unlike seemingly the rest of the world—indeed, my sons—I am a Tarantino refusenik.”
Brian Cox is a socialist who favors Scottish independence. Of course he’s not going to have kind things to say about the Iron Lady. In his book, she gets a mention as “a force of devastation who destroyed British industry and laid waste to communities that to this day have never recovered, who sold the country’s fortunes to a deregulated financial sector and encouraged a speculative culture with disastrous consequence.”
Nice, but still not the number one Old Scottish Maggie Thatcher Hater—that would be this queen.
My favorite jab in the book is this assessment of Edward Norton, who Cox worked with on Spike Lee’s 25th Hour: "A nice lad but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director." Clean, simple, quietly devastating.
“I’ll say that one is empathetic to an actor who has to encase themselves in terms of concentration, of focus. They call it their ‘process.’ I hate that word,” Cox told The New York Times Magazine in 2021. “But they have to do it. It’s tiresome beyond belief, but you’ve got to let it go and say ‘This is fine,’ as long as what’s coming out at the end is justifiable.” Remember this foreshadowing in a bit.
There’s a lot to say about former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, like that he exists at the weirdest possible nexus of “disheveled” and “virile.” To Brian Cox, he is an "Eton clown needing psychiatric help for compulsive lying” and the Conservative Party is “a disgrace … it was ill-led by Johnson who made a complete idiot of himself, as he always does.”
If the man hates the word “process,” then he really hates Method acting.
“I don’t hold a lot of the American shit, having to have a religious experience every time you play a part. It’s crap,” Cox told The Hollywood Reporter for the first, but not the last, time in 2022.
When asked about when Succession might be ending in 2022, Cox used the opportunity to tell The Times that, “We don’t want it to overstay its welcome like Billions; that’s past its sell-by date. That will not happen with our show.” Billions did finally end a year later; don’t tell Brian Cox they’ve planned spinoffs called Millions and Trillions.
She may have been the shortest-serving PM in English history, but Cox managed to sneak in a critique during her 44-day tenure. “I think it’s dreadful. I cannot see how she can lead the country and I don’t think she can lead the country because I don’t think people trust her, and if you don’t have trust, you don’t have anything,” he said.
In a 2021 New Yorker profile of Strong, Cox said that he worried about Strong and that “it’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.” Elaborating to Town and Country in 2023, Cox was asked if it was annoying to be around someone who’s always in character. “Oh, it’s fucking annoying,” Cox said. “Don’t get me going on it.”
Meanwhile, as Strong told me: “Everyone’s entitled to have their feelings. I also think Brian Cox, for example, he’s earned the right to say whatever the fuck he wants.”
Cox still had plenty he wanted to say about Method acting during his Logan Roy farewell tour.
“I don’t put up with all that American shit. I’m sorry. All that sort of ‘I think, therefore I feel,’” Cox told Variety. “Just do the job. Don’t identify.”
“I felt nothing when I played the last scene,” he added about filming his Succession death scene. “Nothing! It was the last scene, finito.”
Spoken like a true hitman Santa! At this point, you have to wonder if he is in fact the one who’s Method acting.
Speaking to a Miami-based luxury publication called Haute Living, Cox said, “in my opinion, we shouldn’t have a monarchy. It’s not viable; it doesn’t make any sense. It’s tradition and all that, they say. I say, ‘Fuck it! Move on!’” More like Hate Living.
For Variety’s Actors on Actors interview series in 2023, Cox was paired with Emily Blunt. In between discussing the usual Actors on Actors things, Cox got off some complaints about LA. “I used to live in Los Angeles, but I ran out of farmers markets. And when that’s gone, where am I going to go? What am I going to do in Los Angeles? Everybody’s so miserable,” he said, while Blunt nodded politely. “They pretend they’re happy, but they’re deeply miserable.”
So I’m guessing we won’t get the Brian Cox Erewhon Smoothie.
Look, Cox was born in 1946. Of course he’s going to have thoughts on “woke culture.”
“The whole woke, what we’ve talked about before, the whole woke culture is truly awful […] and the shaming culture,” he told Piers Morgan in 2023. “I don’t know where it comes from. Who are the arbiters of this shaming? And it’s very hard to pin them down, and, it turns out, it’s usually a bunch of millennials. And who gave them the halos? I suppose in a way they’re probably saying, ‘Well you’ve all screwed it up so we may as well do something about it.’ But it’s from the wrong principle. It comes from the wrong place.”
Cox is not one to not name names. But in a rare moment, he chose not to, referring to some anonymous directors as “idiots” and “bozos.”
“I’ve been very lucky with directors, but I’ve also worked with some real bozos. And they couldn’t direct a certain thing into a top hat,” he said. “You have to learn the lesson and say ‘Oh, I see, I’m working with an idiot, but I’m not going to let it stop me getting to where I’m supposed to go.’ And that happens a lot.”
“I really want directors who can inspire that,” he added. “And sadly not a lot of them do.”
After a post-Succession lull, Cox has been back in full force promoting his role in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. As The Standard reports, “no one was safe from actor Brian Cox’s wrath as he launched into a tirade about terrible films, actors, theatre critics, and politicians at HistFest last night.” And what, pray tell, did Cox decide to pop off about at a history festival?
For starters, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon last fall. “Terrible. It’s terrible,” Cox said. “A truly terrible performance by Joaquin Phoenix. It really is appalling. I don’t know what he was thinking. I think it’s totally his fault and I don’t think Ridley Scott helps him. I would have played it a lot better than Joaquin Phoenix, I tell you that. You can say it’s good drama. No—it’s lies.”
“I think he’s well named,” Cox added. “Joaquin…whackeen... whacky. It’s a sort of whacky performance.”
Stop! Stop! He’s already dead.
Cox plays patriarch James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s play, but he’s been irritated at critics who made any sort of Succession comparisons.
“It’s stupid! Why make that comparison? It’s so obvious,” he said at HistFest. “Most critics are stupid. They really are. Theater criticism has gone right down the tubes. You think of those wonderful critics of the past, there’s nobody to match them now. Because they don’t do their homework.”
Someone dared ask Cox about his favorite subject at HistFest, and he still had some gas in the tank.
“Oh, no, that’s all bollocks. It’s a kind of nonsense,” Cox said. “We’re transmitters. That’s what we are as actors. We transmit energy.”
Not content to keep his hating contained to everything on our earthly plane, Cox has started beefing with God.
In an interview with The Starting Line podcast, he said that “religion does hold us back because it’s belief systems which are outside ourselves. They’re not dealing with who we are, we’re dealing [with], ‘Oh if God says this and God does that’, and you go, ‘Well what is God?’ We’ve created that idea of God, and we’ve created it as a control issue, and it’s also a patriarchal issue.”
He then goes on to call the Bible “one of the worst books ever, for me, from my point of view, because it starts with the idea that out of Adam’s rib, this woman was created. And they’ll believe it. ’Cause they’re stupid.”
What will Brian Cox hate next? Watch this space.