Entertainment

The Sassiest Things 'Succession' Star Brian Cox Says About Hollywood in His New Memoir

Brian Cox lets his curmudgeonly side loose in his new memoir 'Putting the Rabbit in the Hat.'

HBO
HBO
HBO

Brian Cox, best known these days as the morally bankrupt Logan Roy on HBO’s Succession, has many wonderful things to say about many wonderful people he’s worked with over the course of his 60-plus-year stage and screen career in his new memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. Spike Lee is “one of the best directors” he’s ever collaborated with and a “consummate cineaste,” Cox says while recounting production on 25th Hour. Scarlett Johansson is “divine, funny, smart, and wonderful.” Alan Rickman was the “sweetest, kindest, nicest, and most incredibly smart men I’ve ever met.”

These sorts of pleasantries have not been the main attraction surrounding the US release of his memoir, which came out in the UK last summer and became available stateside on January 18. The book has generated headlines for “going full beast mode” on stars like Johnny Depp, Ed Norton, Michael Caine, and perennial frenemy Michael Gambon (“Dear God, don’t let Michael Gambon do the eulogy” at his funeral, he teases). “Listen, I’m too old, too tired, and too talented for any of that shit,” he told Deadline when asked if maybe being too honest in his writing has put him in a vulnerable position. Fair enough, my dude.

It’s worth noting that Putting the Rabbit in the Hat is a more sensitive reflection on Cox’s life, who was born poor as the youngest child of five in Dundee, Scotland, and submitting oneself to the craft of acting, ruminating on countless theater, movie, and TV productions with too many delightful anecdotes to name here, than it is a takedown of industry peers. But after a lifetime dealing with the egos, failures, and successes of showbiz, it’s only natural that the 75-year-old Cox let loose the curmudgeon within for us normies to soak up. Thus, I’ve compiled the sort of juice we all really want from a celebrity memoir: the bitchiest tidbits and wildest gossip. And if the represented parties are offended, well, as Logan Roy would say, they can kindly fuck right off.

HBO
HBO
HBO

Jeremy Strong and method acting

Cox makes his distaste for actors going method known a few times. (One is a cheeky story about working with a shadowboxing Daniel Day-Lewis on the set of 1997’s The Boxer.) But the greater point of intrigue, especially after that barnburner of a New Yorker profile, is with his on-screen son, Jeremy Strong. “I’ll put up with anything as long as the result is good. For example, Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall in Succession. I don’t always agree with him regarding the way he prepares or the way he does things, but his ‘process’ is his business. It’s nothing to do with me; as long as it never gets in the way when we actually play the scene then that’s fine, and, as it happens, it’s always great.”

Steven Seagal

“Steven Seagal is as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen,” Cox blasts out the gate, remembering his time with Seagal on 1996’s The Glimmer Man. “He radiates a studied serenity, as though he’s on a higher plane to the rest of us, and while he’s certainly on a different plane, no doubt about that, it’s probably not a higher one. Seagal suffers from that 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. … That feeling of deep-seated insecurity. All actors suffer from it. We’re all desperately insecure. All of us, that is, except Steven Seagal.”

John Schlesinger as a theater director

Cox met director John Schlesinger, a wild story in and of itself, in 1976-after his Oscar accolades for 1965’s Darling and 1972’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (both Best Director-nommed), and 1969’s Midnight Cowboy (which won Best Picture and Best Director)-and was asked to perform in an outing with the National Theater in London. And, oh boy: “John Schlesinger’s Julius Caesar was a misbegotten nightmare if ever there was one. … As a film director? Unsurpassed. Among the best in the world. Riding the crest of a critical and commercial wave that most movie directors can only ever dream of. But as a theatre director? As a director of classics? Despite the fact that he was by no means a rank amateur in this realm… Schlesinger exhibited a somewhat nervous, uptight air around Julius Caesar. ‘I need to understand this,’ he would fret, ‘I really need to understand this.’ Yes, we thought to ourselves. Understanding Julius Caesar would indeed be an advantage when it comes to directing it. … It wasn’t that [the actors] were unprofessional (well, a bit), just that the whole thing had the air of a school production.”

Disney
Disney
Disney

Johnny Depp

“I turned my nose up at the part of the Governor in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, a role that was eventually played by Jonathan Pryce. The guy who directed Pirates was Gore Verbinski, with whom I made The Ring, and he’s a lovely chap but I think I blotted my copybook by turning down the Governor. It would have been a money-spinner, but of all the parts in that film it was the most thankless, plus I would have ended up doing it for film after film and missed out on all the other nice things I’ve done. 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. 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. If Johnny Depp went for Jack Sparrow now, they’d give it to Brendan Gleeson.

“So no-no regrets about Pirates, I don’t think.”

Big, burly men

A thought experiment: Are bulky tough guys on screen character actors, or… something else? “What about somebody like, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger? Is Arnold Schwarzenegger a character actor? No, because he’s not an actor. He’s a star. He’s a creature. That’s the other thing in our profession, we have creatures. The Rock is a creature. Vin Diesel.”

Michael Gambon

In Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, Cox gushes about the Irish actor Michael Gambon, who played Albus Dumbledore in the “Harry fucking Potter” movies, though their relationship sounds like a mix between childhood rabblerousers and a bickering old married couple. One of many anecdotes about them together is from the production of Othello at Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1986: “He would get up to all kinds of naughtiness. He’d be doing the mad scene and mouth things to me. He might go, ‘I love you, Iago, I love you,’ just to make me laugh. I used to get so angry with him. Another of his tricks was to suddenly stop acting in the middle of a scene. I’d come off stage and go, ‘What the fuck? What’s going on?’

‘Oh, I was bored,’ he’d declaim airily. ‘I got bored.’

‘Bored you may be, but I was the guy opposite you and I wasn’t bored.’

He said, ‘Yes, well. I was. I was bored.’ He could be frustrating like that. [Director Peter] Dews used to lose it with him. ‘All I ever get from you is dumb insolence, Gambon, dumb insolence.'”

Quentin Tarantino

“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. 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.

“That said, if the phone rang, I’d do it. One of the guiding lights behind my decision to go to Hollywood, the two guiding lights, if you like, were Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, both of whom did at an early age what I should have done ten years before I actually did it, i.e. bugger off to Hollywood. They did all kinds of roles and broadened their range. Tim, of course, practically broke out with Reservoir Dogs; Gary, with an eye-catching cameo in True Romance. Got to admit: Tarantino didn’t do them a lot of harm.”

Keystone-FranceGamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Keystone-FranceGamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Keystone-FranceGamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Princess Margaret and the royal crown

“Did I forget to mention that I got touched up by Princess Margaret once?” For some context, this was the night of Cox’s 23rd birthday in 1969 after a performance of In Celebration with Alan Bates and Lindsay Anderson, the latter of whom had gifted Cox a nice red shirt that he wore when he was basically cornered by the Countess of Snowdon. “‘I thought you were so wonderfully hooded,’ [Princess Margaret] said to me. ‘I really wanted to know more about you, because you were so hooded in your performance.’

Hooded, I thought.

‘I didn’t know who you were,’ she continued, ‘but I wanted to know who you were, and as a result I was transfixed by you for the whole evening.’ She paused to take a sip from her drink. ‘You certainly made a very profound impression on me.’

‘Thank you, ma’am, thank you,’ I said, with suitable deference. The conversation duly moved on to the fact that it was my birthday and that I’d been given this present by Lindsay Anderson. This shirt. This lovely red shirt.

‘Oh yes,’ she said admiringly, ‘it really is a lovely shirt, isn’t it?’ And with that she put a hand to my chest, just at the base of my throat, undid one button and slid her hand inside the shirt.

Christ, I thought, Princess Margaret is feeling me up. One day I’m going to be writing about this in my memoirs.

No, that’s a lie. I didn’t think that. In actual fact, what I thought was this.

Nothing.

I froze. I froze because Princess Margaret was feeling me up. No, trying to feel me up. Her hand was inside my shirt and travelling in the direction of my left nipple yet Princess Margaret was just chatting away as though this was something she had done a hundred times before. As though tweaking actors’ nipples was all in a day’s work for her.”

If that bewildering encounter wasn’t enough, there’s also his take on the British monarchy: “Wittingly or unwittingly, we maintain and support a system that exists to put people in their place and keep them there, and it all springs from the notion of the union and the Queen, the royal family and all the pageantry, which at the end of the day, I’m sorry, I happen to think is bollocks.”

Donald Trump

In comparing the strongman Roy patriarch Cox portrays on Succession, he, naturally, brings up the Trump of it all. “The other day, I was asked, ‘Would you ever fancy playing Donald Trump?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s such a bad script.’ There’s no dimension to it. That’s the problem with Trump. There’s nothing to be investigated, which would make him unrewarding to play. Logan Roy is more interesting because he’s a darker character, but he’s got other elements which are surprising too. That’s the great reward of him. He does villainous things but he’s not really a villain. And another thing that interests me about him is that we have this in common: we’re both disappointed in how the human experiment has turned out.”

Ed Norton

“Ed Norton was in [25th Hour] and he’s a nice lad but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director. He and I had this scene set in the bar owned by my character. Spike [Lee] set it up immaculately, but Ed came in and was saying, ‘Now, I’ve done some work on the script and I’ve got a few ideas and I’d like you to think about them. I’ve rewritten a few things in there…’

Spike was like, ‘Oh, good, let me see.’ He had a look at Ed’s notes and then said, ‘Well that’s very interesting. Okay, so what we’re going to do now is…’ and put Ed very firmly in his place.

It was done beautifully. Seamless. It was taking Ed’s points on board but making sure Ed knew that we were doing things his way. And the fact that he did it without upsetting Ed, who after all does have a reputation for being a little volatile, was really quite an achievement.”

Focus Features
Focus Features
Focus Features

The Churchill showdown with Gary Oldman

If you had forgotten that Cox had played Winston Churchill, in a film “just called Churchill,” you’d be forgiven, considering it was the “small picture” against Gary Oldman’s transformative, eventually Best Actor Oscar-winning Churchill in Darkest Hour that both had the “misfortune” of coming out in 2017. “[It] was afflicted by the Curse of Brian Cox, a phenomenon which was, I believe, coined by the film critics Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode to describe what happens when I play a character and then another actor picks up an Oscar for appearing in a different film as the same character.”

… Playing him, I saw Churchill as this little fat kid who went to Harrow (and having had my own experience of being a little fat kid, I had a sense of what that was like), but who then became this extraordinary guy, this journalist who embarked on the ‘young Winston’ years prior to becoming one of the great iconic figures of twentieth-century Britain.”

… Gary then got an Oscar for it. The fact that he got the Oscar? I don’t mind that at all. No, I know what you’re thinking. I really don’t. But what I do mind is that their film was cobblers. Ours might have been a little too heavy, and it certainly went against the popular belief that Churchill was not only in favour of D-Day but heavily involved in the planning, which I think made it unpalatable to many people, but at least it didn’t have a scene in which Churchill catches a tube and begins talking to ‘ordinary,’ cap-doffing people on the underground, asking them how they’re enjoying the war and so on. Which is what they had in Darkest Hour.

In other words, ours was a more honest film, just that we didn’t open in that wonderful window between Thanksgiving and New Year. The ‘awards season.’ We opened in the summer and so were eclipsed by a film that was more expensive but infinitely more shallow, a crowd-pleasing farrago. (And far be it from me to suggest that ‘crowd-pleasing farrago’ sums up the vast majority of awards ceremonies.)”

Michael Caine

“I wouldn’t describe Michael as my favourite, but he’s Michael Caine. An institution. And being an institution will always beat having range. Caine was, and probably still is, very dismissive of the drunken-actor brigade, and one of his targets, of course, was Richard Harris, another famous drunk who became a friend. Harris used to say, ‘Jesus fucking Christ. Michael fucking Caine. This thing with the eye-the eye doesn’t move. What fucking bollocks,’ which was a reference to something Caine did in an acting video, the idea being that in close-ups you should always focus on just one eye of the other actor, so that your own eyes don’t move around. I won’t give my own view on this technique, but put it this way, Harris was right.”Want more Thrillist? Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.

Leanne Butkovic (@leanbutk) is an entertainment editor at Thrillist.

Entertainment

Where to Celebrate Lunar New Year 2023 in Australia

And what it means to be in the year of the Rabbit.

where to celebrate lunar new year australia

Starting with the new moon on Sunday, January 22, this Lunar New Year ushers in the year of the Rabbit. We’ve put together a guide on celebrating the Lunar New Year in Australia.

What is special about the year of the Rabbit?

As you might know, each year has an animal sign in the Chinese Zodiac, which is based on the moon and has a 12-year cycle. This year, we celebrate the year of the rabbit, known to be the luckiest out of all twelve animals. It symbolises mercy, elegance, and beauty.

What celebrations are taking place and how can I get involved?

There are plenty of festivals happening all around the country which you can get involved with. Here they are per state.

New South Wales

Darling Harbour Fireworks
When: Every year, Sydney puts on a fireworks show, and this year, you can catch it on January 28 and February 4 at 9 pm in Darling Harbour.

Dragon Boat Races
When: Witness three days of dragon boat races and entertainment on Cockle Bay to usher in the Lunar New Year. The races will commence on January 27 and finish on January 29.

Lion Dances
When: Catch a traditional Lion Dance moving to the beat of a vigorous drum bringing good luck and fortune for the Lunar New Year. The dance performances will happen across Darling Harbour on Saturday, January 21, Sunday, January 22, and Sunday, February 4 and 5, around 6 pm and 9 pm.

Lunar New Year at Cirrus Dining
When: Barangaroo’s waterfront seafood restaurant, Cirrus, is celebrating the Year of the Rabbit with a special feast menu. Cirrus’ LNY menu is $128pp with optional wine pairing and is available from Saturday, January 21, to Sunday, February 5.

Auntie Philter
When: Hello Auntie’s owner and executive chef, Cuong Nguyen will be dishing out some of the most classic Vietnamese street foods with his mum, Linda. All of Philter’s favourites will be on offer, as well as Raspberry Pash Beer Slushies and other cocktails being served at the Philter Brewing rooftop bar on Sunday, January 22 and Sunday, January 29.

Victoria

Lunar New Year Festival
When: Ring in the Lunar New Year with food, music, arts, and more on Sunday, January 22, from 10 am to 9 pm.

Lunar New Year at the National Gallery of Victoria
When: Celebrate the year of the rabbit at the National Gallery of Victoria’s festival of art, food, and art-making activities for everyone from 10 am-5 pm.

Queensland

BriAsia Festival
When: From February 1-19, Brisbane will come alive with performances, including lion dances and martial arts displays. There will be street food, workshops, comedy and more.

South Australia

Chinatown Adelaide Street Party
When: Adelaide is set to hose a fun-filled day celebrating the Chinese New Year on Saturday, January 28, from 12 pm to 9 pm.

Western Australia

Crown Perth
When: Across January and February, Crown Perth hosts free live entertainment, including colourful lion dances, roving mascots, and drumming performances. The restaurants will also throw banquets and menus dedicated to the Lunar New Year.

Get the latest from Thrillist Australia delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here.


Related

Our Best Stories, Delivered Daily
The best decision you'll make all day.