The landmark latest episode of Succession this weekend has likely left fans of the HBO series with a Brian Cox-shaped hole in their heart. Without delving into spoilers, it’s sufficient to say that it left many of us wanting more, if not with his aging media tyrant Logan Roy, then with other equally corrosive or combustible characters.
It’s not that the 76-year-old Cox only plays one type, but his weathered features and dagger-like stare have always led him to be cast as characters of an abrasive nature. Sure, he might look at times like a belligerent Burl Ives, but he has a sense of humor about himself too. And self-awareness.
He once described his look this way: “I think I’ve got a characterful face; it’s like the map of a small planet,” Cox wrote in The Guardian in 2014. “As I have pockmarked skin, people think I have a villainous face, but I don’t. It can take on a villainous hue: the face just translates the inner being and, if you have to play someone with a dubious personality and you do the work within, then the face changes accordingly.”
Cox has excelled at using that face for characters who are perpetually exasperated, surly, and savage. His expression seems to be permanently radiate: Give me a fucking break. Here’s a journey back through his filmography.
1. Nicholas and Alexandra (1971)
After years of work on stage and television, 1971’s Nicholas and Alexander, about the Communist revolution that felled Russia’s last czar and his family, provided the then 24-year-old Cox with his first big-screen role. He played Leon Trotsky, the Marxist ally of Vladimir Lenin, who helped lead the uprising in 1917.
In this scene, Trotsky is less of a firebrand and more of a reserved tactician as he, Lenin (Michael Bryant), and others in the Bolshevik leadership plot their future while in hiding. It’s a small but memorable role in the vast ensemble, and Cox recalled feeling intimidated rather than being the intimidator. “I was given these glasses for Trotsky, these very thick pebble glasses. I couldn’t see out of them, but it was my first movie so I didn’t know what to say,” Cox recalled at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2012. “At one point I had to go out the door, and I couldn’t find the door handle.”
2. Manhunter (1986)
Anthony Breznican
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