‘I’m part of the dodo race’
‘No, you can’t have a f***ing selfie!’ Barley does battle with Succession’s Brian Cox at his London home. Portrait: Emir Eralp
Take two Dundonians, one a poet, the other a Hollywood star, add politics, nationalism, culture wars, Logan Roy and a good slug of whisky…and stir. Don Paterson and Brian Cox set the world to rights, exclusively for Barley. Photography & Video by Emir Eralp
Don Paterson: Shall we dive straight into the end of Succession. How do you feel about the fact that Logan was killed off so early in the final series?
Brian Cox: I was fine with what happened and happy to be finished, but I would have done it later. In my view it is strange to be missing the main protagonist from so early on, but we are hostages to the writers in situations like this.
DP: The typical viewer might project some grief on your part over the breakup of the Succession family. Or are you more like ‘job done and move on’?
BC: Well, it’s been a phenomenal journey for me. There’s no question it’s changed my life in so many ways. I’ve lost my anonymity, you know, I’ve lost all of that. That’s all gone. I used to be the guy you’d say ‘Oh, you were in such and such or no, or no you weren’t’ ….but now I’m Logan Roy and everybody just wants me to tell them to fuck off!
DP: [Laughs] I’ve heard that people ask you for ‘Fuck off’ selfies….
BC: Oh yeah, all the time. I say they can have one for $500. The best or worst example of that was in L.A. when I attending a #MeToo event where Ronan Farrow was reading from his book Catch and Kill, and I was invited by Rosanna Arquette to come along. So I turned up - I was late - and I stood at the back of the hall. The place was full of all these Hollywood wives getting very intense. Anyway, it was an interesting talk. Finally Ronan finished and there was a round of applause. And then the audience all turned around and saw me and immediately brought out their phones and started yelling me for to tell them to Fuck Off!
DP: What did you do?
Watch Brian Cox talk about his life in whisky, exclusively for Barley
BP: Well, I’m thinking, this is a #MeToo meeting, is that really appropriate? There’s me, an old white dinosaur telling all these women to fuck off. There’s something that doesn’t quite compute here.
DP: It’s odd. Like you, I’m a long-standing supporter of feminism, and yet Succession is one of the best essays on masculinity, in all its forms and status comedy, that I can remember…
BP: Yeah, I mean, the show is really about the last vestiges of the dying patriarchy. That the patriarchy doesn’t work. But you can’t tell Logan that because he's the arch patriarch.
It reflects our state of being at the moment, the way we all are, all those horrible mistakes we’re making, I’m thinking particularly of what’s happening to women in Iran and Afghanistan. So the show is kind of a death knell.
‘Succession is really about the last vestiges of the dying patriarchy. That the patriarchy doesn’t work. But you can’t tell Logan that because he’s the arch patriarch’
DP: Do you have any hope for the death of the patriarchy?
BC: I do. We have to keep up the pressure on Iran. My wife is very dedicated to it because she’s half Iranian through her dad who only passed away last year. So it’s partly in his memory that she keeps up the fight, although he would have told her not to bother.
DP: Really?
BC: Oh yeah, but he left Iran when he was 16. But it’s awful what’s happening there, from that poor woman in the Hijab to the situation in Afghanistan, where women can’t even get any education. It’s only a matter of time before the mullahs in Iran actually stop women going to university. And we have to do something. We can’t allow that to happen.
DP: It’s about where one’s priorities should lie at the moment, isn’t it. I mean, I’m thinking of the situation at home in Scotland where, at the time of speaking, Nicola Sturgeon got very entangled in the details of gender recognition reform when there were maybe more urgent causes that needed addressing.
BC: I think that’s right. The SNP and Sturgeon got it wrong, but at least they tried to face up to the issue in a way other countries didn’t. But the point for me is that being 16 and not being given proper medical or psychiatric advice on huge life decisions is a big, big mistake.
DP: How do you feel about Sturgeon going, and the state the party’s currently in?
‘We need to counter what the Tories have set up over the last 13 years, which is a policy of division – lying and cheating and maintaining a horrible status quo’
BC: I think it’s sad what’s happened to the party. I think the party has gotten very big, and somehow the church is getting very big as well. That’s always been the difficulty of the Scottish national party because it seems to cover so many bases. And I think it’s been a very difficult party to lead, and I think Nicola did a superb job, really superb job. She’s a tremendous loss because she did have a clear vision about where the country should go.
I’m not saying that the vision has gotten any way diminished – but there are lots of visions now, lots of ideas on how to deal with things, and the party really needs to think about itself and its commitment to those areas of need: not just independence but improving the wellbeing of the people of Scotland. It’s certainly been good on that track, but it seems to have been derailed somewhat. I’d like to see it get back on track.
Brian Cox with Nicola Sturgeon at the 2022 Edinburgh International Book Festival.
DP: And how do you see the way forward?
BC: I think this is a crucial time. We mustn’t lose our momentum, we mustn’t lose the momentum for independence but we also must take into account exactly what’s happening in the country on a ground level. This is difficult because when a party becomes as broad as the SNP has become, that means it doubles the task; it has to coordinate a) governing the country and b) moving towards some kind of independence.
Clearly what we’ve seen over the last decades of Tory rule is that it doesn’t function well - England is very much a feudal country, but Scotland much less so. Scotland is much more egalitarian, and we need to practice that egalitarianism quite strongly. We need to counter what the Tories have set up over the last 13 years, which is a policy of division – lying and cheating and maintaining a horrible status quo where class is still not dealt with on any deep level throughout this disunited kingdom. We need to be free, and we also have to take care of our people.
I’m personally very sad about Nicola’s departure because she was formidable. There was nobody like her, the woman had such incredible integrity. And the abuse she was getting on Facebook and generally in the press was unmerited, just appalling. Appalling.
‘There was nobody like Nicola, the woman had such incredible integrity. And the abuse she was getting in the press was appalling’
DP: Yes, it’s so sad that her reputation as a feminist was tarnished in the end by all this stuff. Personally, whatever the merits of the GRR arguments, I think it was weird the focus didn’t stay on the unremunerated labour of women, the zero clearance rate of rape and sexual assault charges, all that stuff – I mean, it was bizarre for her political energies to take that particular focus. And now you see feminists turning against her. I just find it a heartbreaking end to her time in office.
BC: There’s so much confusion around these issues. It’s like the way everybody turned on J.K. Rowling over her gender-critical views. That was appalling. And I say that as someone who is not a huge J.K. Rowling fan. I know she’s not very keen on Scottish independence, so we disagree on that. But at the same time, she’s entitled to talk about stuff in terms of her own body. It’s a form of McCarthyism that we’re living through at the moment, and it’s really not acceptable. And it has to be stopped. People have to stand up and say, we’ve had enough of this shit. And also the people doing this are all kids, who don’t know any better because they haven’t lived lives like we have.
DP: They show incredible disrespect, especially, for the opinion of older women.
BC: Exactly! Exactly. It’s terrible. Shocking. I’m horrified at that.
DP: I think the more people like you that speak out, the more confidence others will have and the less they’ll fear being cancelled for their views. Not that anybody is actually being ‘cancelled’, but they do self-censor.
‘It’s a form of McCarthyism that we’re living through at the moment, and it’s really not acceptable. And it has to be stopped. People have to stand up and say, we’ve had enough of this shit’
BC: The thing is I don’t give a fuck, quite frankly, I just say what I feel. I’m too old, too tired and too talented [laughs]
DP: Talking about cancel culture, I’m sure you were equally infuriated by the sight of Edinburgh University scratching David Hume’s name off the University building at the behest of some students.
BC: That’s awful.
DP: I mean sure – he espoused the kind of awful racist views that were as common as breathing out in his day and age. But you’d think it was the only thing Hume had ever done with his life. This bizarre insistence that the past has to live up to the ideals of the present – as if we were getting everything right now. I actually had a conversation with a student and I asked him ‘Do you know who David Hume was? And he just said: ‘I don’t care.’ All the university had to do was say – yes, what Hume said was awful, but nah – we’re not going to do that.
BC: But this is happening everywhere now. The millennials are getting out of hand because they think nobody wants to know about the views of the old farts, but they’ve GOT IT WRONG! Because they DON’T FUCKING KNOW! They’re STUPID! [laughs]
DP: They seem to have little sense of history.
BC: That’s the thing. A sense of history is so important. It’s so important. It’s why we try to rewrite history. And you can’t. All this ‘You can only follow the line that we decree is the right one’ and I say, ‘Fuck Off, I’m not doing that. I’m following the line that is there. That is true.’
DP: Having said that, there were plenty of people who deserved all they got for their behaviour on the back of #Metoo.
BC: Oh yes. I mean, Harvey Weinstein. He was a horrible, horrible man. I used to feel like I needed a shower after I saw him.
DP: Your solution seems to be ‘Hold your line, speak out.’ Is that easier advice to give because we’re men?
BC: Probably. Though I’m part of a dodo race, a white male, and we don’t have any real credibility anymore. I understand that. Ultimately, we are paying the dues of our ancestors who have behaved so badly.
DP: That gives you a certain kind of freedom as well?
BC: Yeah. It puts you into a sort of no holds barred situation [laughs].
‘Harvey Weinstein was a horrible, horrible man. I used to feel like I needed a shower after I saw him’
DP: Can we come back to the SNP for a moment. How did you feel about the quality of SNP leadership candidates? I was so pissed off at Angus Robertson for not standing…..
BC: I’m still angry at Angus. We really needed somebody like that. He’s got such a great perspective. And he’s bright. We have a problem with extremes in the party. Nicola was a democratic socialist at heart, and it's terrible that we've lost that impetus. I mean, do we really want somebody from the Wee Frees running the SNP? What does that mean? I mean, obviously I'm very anti-religious anyway….
DP: She’s like: ‘you should get awarded points for being straight and honest about your opinions’. But hang on - those are your opinions?
BC: No, no, you can’t have that. Angus would have been the answer. He’s a European. He has a fantastic grasp on policy. His instincts are good. And don’t forget too how much damage Alex Salmond and his nonsense did to the party.
‘It was strange he went so early on’: Cox as Logan Roy in Succession with on-screen daughter Shiv, played by Sarah Snook
DP: These old-school narcissists always overstay their welcome - they can be useful for getting you to a certain point, but to maintain them in positions of leadership for too long… it never turns out well. So how do you think it’s going to play out in the future for Scotland? I’ve heard a couple of things you’ve said recently that suggest you’re thinking more in terms of a federal solution rather than all-out independence. Would that be fair?
BC: Well, if you look at the map of Britain, we’re clearly all linked. You can’t ignore it. I mean, I am an Anglophile. I’ve lived in London, I trained in London. But London is like a city state. It’s not like the rest of England. It should be its own separate entity. We shouldn’t have a United Kingdom, because the United Kingdom doesn’t work. It’s still based on class and it’s essentially feudal. And that’s the problem with monarchy. Monarchy still keeps everybody in their place.
We should have got rid of that years ago. The Labour Party has failed us. Tony Blair has a lot to do with that. And I say that as someone who did their party-political broadcast in 1997. It was one of the best times ever, so full of possibility. But the fact is these islands have been a mess for so long, and Scotland has suffered needlessly because of that. I just feel that the only answer is for there to be a United Federation of these islands.
DP: I think that’s more likely now that the Supreme Court has definitively shown the union is non-voluntary. We need to find a middle way.
BC: Yes. Every country should be autonomous. Wales should be autonomous. Northern Ireland should be autonomous. I mean, Ireland should be joined together. But Scotland would thrive as an autonomous state, we need to stand on our own.
And also, we are all Celts after all - the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish and the English are a mishmash of everything, that’s the heritage. But it’s not our heritage, it’s not where we come from. And it took me a long time to realise that, to come to terms with the idea of independence because when I was a younger man I thought ‘No, I don’t want to go down that road’. I felt that our country could function in the union, but it never did. And that was the failure of Labour, and the failure of Blair and Gordon Brown. We got stuck because we never faced up to our individual needs, or what our culture needs. And when I think about growing up in Scotland in the fifties, it was North Britain, it wasn't Scotland, because Scotland had never really been able to re- discover itself.
‘These islands have been a mess for so long, and Scotland has suffered needlessly because of that. The only answer is for there to be a United Federation’
DP: Why do you think that was?
BC: Because we were canon-fodder in the First World War, and then we lost Ireland as well. My grandpa Johnny did two years on the Western Front, which was unheard of, and was invalided out with emphysema. He became a drunk and died an unhappy man, unsurprisingly. He was just fodder in an iniquitous war. It’s always the smaller countries that suffer more. They’re the ones the shit falls down on, and that’s what happened to Scotland, and we’ve been treated like that for far too long.
But look at the Scottish Enlightenment and how it influenced the American Revolution. The Constitution of America is very much based on the Treaty of Arbroath. The mark we’ve made as a nation is enormous. But none of that is in the collective consciousness of Scots in the way it should be – about what we’ve done and who we are as a people. We got rubbed out.
So we’ve never recovered our sense of being, and we’re just beginning to do that. But we’re being thwarted in that endeavour. The only answer is to accept that we are an island nation, all of us, and we have to come together – on a federal basis. And then we can start to ask ‘How does this work? How do we make this right?’
DP: It’s not really nationalism you’re talking about. It’s more something like old fashioned patriotism, where you extend a sense of family and community to a certain group of people within defined geographic boundaries. I think that’s a sensible way to go.
BC: I hate the word nationalist. It has so many connotations, National Socialism being one. I just wish it wasn’t called the Scottish National Party. It should be the Scottish Independence Party. That’s what it should be called. Don’t get me wrong, I think the SNP has done a great job, but it’s in a precarious state because of the extremes it contains.
DP: Coming back to Labour, I’m not sensing any great enthusiasm for Keir Starmer here either.
BC: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
DP: Because he’s just looking to maintain that London-centric status quo?.
BC: I did a Question Time panel with him and he was there with his adviser….he was so inorganic. You have to be organic to be a good leader, because it’s about being alive, you know? And in real life. It’s not about a bunch of dried flowers pressed between the pages of a book.
DP: I always think of him as a walking focus group.
‘I did a Question Time panel with Keir Starmer and he was there with his adviser….he was so inorganic’
BC: I think Andy Burnham would probably have been the best to lead the party after Corbyn. He’s done a great job in Manchester. And that’s a tough job. Manchester is not easy and he’s done a fantastic job, considering the rest of the north of England is in such a mess.
DP: Though I was in Manchester the other day and was really sorry to see how far it had fallen, and you think - God, this is the richest town in the region …
BC: Covid hit them pretty bad too.
DP: Going there also makes you realise the extent to which London is fuelling the worst regional inequality in Europe. The resources that are being diverted to London, it’s shocking.
BC: Well, the BBC is trying to address that with the move north, but there’s still a lot of it not based in Salford, so it’s still problematic. And actually that’s why I believe in a Federation, because England is suffering more than anywhere. At least Scots have our identity and we have become a country. As I said, this wasn’t the case when I was growing up. It was North Britain. But Scotland has emerged from all that and suddenly it’s its own animal.
DP: You’re right. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know how recently that sense of a coherent national identity has come about.
BC: Absolutely.
DP: Speaking of the blight facing Manchester and so many other cities, you and I are both from Dundee and from a fairly similar economic background. I wonder if there is a sort of resentful, neurotic feeling about falling back into poverty that is still with you?
BC: The poverty thing does kind of hang over my head like the Sword of Damocles. When you’ve been a boy with a mother on a widow’s pension and she went through a lot - she had several traumatic electric shock treatments which destroyed her short-term memory. She didn’t realise who I was for a long time, it was so bad. She couldn’t work - she did eventually - but we relied on her getting her widow’s pension every Friday, and there was never anything for dinner. So you would go across to the local chippy and get battered bits, the wee bits from the back of the chip pan. It wasn’t like that all the time, but we did live like that. And that doesn’t ever leave you. You’re marked with that, whether you like it or not.
DP: You’re certainly not showing any signs of slowing up in your work. What’s driving you?
BC: I believe in practice, practising your job and I want every opportunity I can get to do that. I’m the opposite of Daniel Day-Lewis, a wonderful actor, and he’ll do one role every three years, and he’s always great, but I think ‘That’s nice, nice that you can afford to do that’! [laughs] At the same time, I think, where’s his practice? And he retires in his 50s, just when the parts start getting better. I love being old enough because the roles are so much better than they were when I was young and confused. Because that's what you're playing. And now I’m playing old and curmudgeonly, because that’s what I am!
‘The poverty thing does kind of hang over my head like the Sword of Damocles. When you’ve been a boy in Dundee with a mother on a widow’s pension who has electric shock treatment ’
DP: Life-long learning, that’s the thing. Are you still learning things?
BC: Yeah, absolutely. All the time. I mean, it's a big learning process. It’s organic because what you’re dealing with is organic material, which is whatever the script is, whatever the play is, whatever the film is, whatever the TV show is, those are the parameters for what you're doing at any given point. And I love that because through that you learn so much, you're learning about how to work with people. You're learning how to deal with people who may be difficult, and you need to find a strategy - a lot of it has to be strategy.
DP: Talking of learning new things – can you tell me about Glenrothan, the movie you’re going to direct based in a Scotch whisky distillery?
BC: It will be physically beautiful because we have found some wonderful locations. I discovered a place called Moulin, near Pitlochry. And there's a great distillery there called Edradour. That’s where we’re hoping to film. But the key is the relationships. It’s about two brothers and about finding your roots, and how your roots liberate you as opposed to binding or tying you to a place.
Brian Cox and Nicole Ansari-Cox at the Succession Season 4 Premiere in New York. Photograph: Lev Radin/ Shutterstock
DP: Are you starring in it as well as directing?
BC: Yes. I play the part of the older brother, who’s stayed behind. He's the one who’s run the business. He's not particularly imaginative, he's quite practical, he's quite understated, and he just does the job. But he's got to a point now where he's getting old and in poor health. His brother is the real talent in the family, he was the youngest ever master distiller. As a young man he has a row with his father and his mother, a vivacious woman. She tells him to leave and he goes to America, to become a writer of the blues. He has a daughter from a relationship with an African-American blues singer and she’s known him all her life. She might have been adopted by him when she was a baby, but he’s her father as far as she’s concerned.
‘I believe in practice, practising your job and I want every opportunity I can get to do that. I’m the opposite of Daniel Day-Lewis, a wonderful actor who retired just at the age the parts start getting good’
After decades, his brother, my character, tries to get him to go back to Scotland, but he ignores him, he has no intention of going back, he’s American now, he’s not Scottish anymore. He has a life there. And so the daughter then kidnaps him, and says ‘You've got to go’. And it makes it difficult for him to say no. And so he gets drunk, gets on the plane, and he comes back to Scotland, and his brother meets him at the airport with the Bentley and they drive from Edinburgh Airport all the way up to Edradour distillery.
Anyway, he’s drunk, he’s been hitting the bottle on the plane and his brother has to open the door to let him throw up, and as he’s doing that he looks up and sees the glen and suddenly his past starts to come back to him.
The story is him coming to terms with who he is. But we’re wrestling with the 40 years of his life he's led in America because that's key to who he is. And it's a great script. It's a really lovely script. It gets resolved in the end. There’s a lot of great music in it as well.
DP: It sounds great. What else are you doing?
BC: I’ve got a packed year. I'm going to be playing Johann Sebastian Bach at the end of the year. And then after that in the new year I’m in Long Day’s Journey Into Night playing James Tyrone, Eugene O’Neill’s father…
DP: What’s the Bach role?
BC: It’s called The Score. It’s about Bach’s relationship with Frederick the Great and how he tried to hoodwink Bach into working at the court with him and Bach resisted him because Frederick was a warmonger. But there were all these tame composers who Bach knew that would work for the emperor. Bach won’t go there, the story is about him keeping Frederick at bay.
‘Social media? I have to be careful because I'm such a big mouth. I have a habit of putting my foot in it - deeply!’
DP: You do seem to be drawn to these fascinating, driven, complex father figures. Logan Roy, Churchill, Bach… Is it just a quirk of casting or is there more to it than that?
BC: It’s more that it’s the empowering side of these great patriarchs that appeals to me. I mean Bach had all these kids, and this huge grand room where they’d all play together, the cacophony must have been ridiculous. It was a proper dynasty. But ironically his wife Anna Magdalena died in poverty. She was a beautiful singer. But at the end of his life she was ignored, cast out, uncared for. It's just another historical example of how women have been treated, so one is trying to examine that at the same time as playing the part.
DP: Can I ask where you stand on social media?
BC: I try to use it as little as I can … I’ll wish someone a Happy Birthday on Facebook and then I look at the other stuff and I think Oh God, the desperation of human beings trying so hard to validate themselves. I have to be careful because I'm such a big mouth. I have a habit of putting my foot in it - deeply!
DP: What do you do to relax?
BC: What I do with my down time is I sleep. I love my bed, it’s my favourite place. I don't go anywhere. I just go to sleep. I'll watch the telly and I'll have a good kip.
DP: And are your dreams untroubled?
BC: I don’t have troubled dreams. I sleep fine. In fact, I don't dream very much these days. Or perhaps I do, it’s just that I can’t remember them….maybe it’s best that way.
Don Paterson is a Scottish poet, writer and musician. His most recent book is The Arctic (Faber)
