Brian Cox: 'I'm not a capitalist - so I see the wealthy all finally hoisted by their own petard'

The Scottish actor has no sympathy for his on-screen 'Succession' family, as they return to Sky Atlantic on Monday

Brian Cox attends HBO's "Succession" season 3 premiere at the American Museum of Natural History on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2021, in New York. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

When Brian Cox was falling in love with movies as a child in Dundee, Scotland, he fell especially hard for the great character actors of Hollywood’s golden era. “Walter Brennan and William Demarest and Eugene Pallette and Jimmy Gleason,” he says wistfully. “These figures came on the screen, and they cut the air.” 

When Cox himself hit middle age and found that he had been unable to transfer the acting success he attained as a leading man of the London and New York stages to film or television, he resolved to follow the path of his boyhood idols. “As I came to a certain age,” he says, “I thought, That’s what I’m prepared to do now.”