My father died and my mother had a series of horrible nervous breakdowns. It was nobody’s fault, it was circumstances I was not in control of and I’m angry about it. “I have a very short temper and I’ve only recently realised that it comes from what I experienced in my childhood. When people stand up for something they believe in, that moves me.” I’m not talking about any grand major incident but just simple acts of human kindness and goodness. A miracle can happen that restores my faith. I’m almost at the point of losing faith in humanity but something is stopping me. The biggest difference between us is that he’s a pessimist and I’m an optimist. “There are certain similarities between him and me. I don’t think that Bezos is a bad man and I’ve met Richard and he’s a sweet man, but they are only making money. These are the people that actually matter. “I think look at the esteem that someone like David Attenborough or that lovely wee Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, are held in. “I don’t think they always have to win,” he replies.
We need to help the planet we have.”īut isn’t one of the abiding lessons of Succession that billionaires always win? That no matter what scandal or disapproval nips at their heels, they will move the levers of the world? No, Richard, we don’t need more spaceships, we just need to think about where we are. I understand the pioneering element of it but, at a time when the world is in such an existential crisis, it’s deeply weird to hear Branson say we need more spaceships. We see the way rich people exempt themselves and we see the nothingness of Bezos and Branson and their pie-in-the-sky plans. All the obvious elements of our lives are up for questioning. He puts the fascination with the Roy family down to the fact that we are “living in very confused times. There are obvious parallels between Logan and the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell but Cox says that he didn’t base the performance on any one of them particularly.
Well, it has been a long game and it’s been a great one.”
At the beginning, older actors, the wise ones anyway, would say to me, it’s going to be the long game for you. “I’ve been in this business for 60 years, since I was 15 years old. “It’s pretty humbling,” he says of this late career renaissance. He gives the old warhorse the growling gravitas of King Lear – a role he played on stage and screen – and the performance as Logan has recently won him a Golden Globe and an Emmy as well as household name recognition. Logan Roy – the menacingly crafty head of the family – seems now like the part that Cox, who rose to fame as a Shakespearean actor, was building up to all along. Succession, the savagely witty show about the jostling for power at the heart of a media dynasty, has become one of the most successful and popular television series of the 21st century. After a long career, first as a stage actor, and then as a supporting actor in television and film, he is having a pop culture moment.