Although Succession ended three years ago, Brian Cox is mitigating some behind-the-scenes Roy family drama.
The Golden Globe winner recently praised his former onscreen son Jeremy Strong as “a wonderful actor” after saying that his co-star’s method acting style was “f*cking annoying” during a 2023 interview.
“I don’t want to go on about Jeremy, because I’ve got into a lot of problems and he’s begged me to stop talking about him,” Cox explained to The Times. “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!”
Amid the fourth and final season of HBO’s Succession, Cox prefaced that Strong is “a very good actor,” adding that the rest of the cast “is all okay with this. But knowing a character and what the character does is only part of the skill set. It’s f*cking annoying. Don’t get me going on it.”
Fellow method actor Daniel Day-Lewis even responded after Cox roped him into the discussion.
Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox in ‘The Succession’
HBO
Strong previously explained that he practices “identity diffusion,” as opposed to traditional method acting
“I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through,” he told The New Yorker, adding, “If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything—anything—that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene. And usually that means clearing away almost everything around and inside you, so that you can be a more complete vessel for the work at hand.”
The actor explained, “To me, the stakes are life and death. I take him as seriously as I take my own life.”
Cox starred in Succession as Waystar RoyCo mogul and patriarch Logan Roy, for the show’s four-season run from 2018 to 2023. Strong played heir apparent Kendall Roy, with his siblings portrayed by Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook and Alan Ruck, each vying to inherit the family business.