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Brian Cox has shared his favorite all-time Succession line — and it’s one many viewers will hear and nod with in agreement.
“I love you, but you’re not serious people … that really sort of summed it all up, didn’t it?” host Seth Meyers asked while welcoming Cox to his Late Night show.
“Well, actually, it was my favorite line that I had to say throughout the whole show,” said Cox. “I loved that line and I just thought, ‘Why didn’t I say that earlier?’ They were damned unserious most of the time.”
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The line came in episode two of the fourth and final season of the Jesse Armstrong-created, Emmy-winning series, which ended its run in May. Cox, who played mogul titan Logan Roy, delivered the line to his children before his untimely death one episode later, and his words haunted his children through the end of the series — and, as the audience is left to imagine, beyond the series fading to black. The three Roy children who fought desperately for their father’s media throne — Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin), watched an outsider, Shiv’s husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), take over the company in a blindside in the end.
Cox told Meyers he felt that Logan had planned Tom’s takeover of the media company — which was the big, final reveal of the series — because he truly felt that his children didn’t add up to anything. Expressing Logan’s harsh parenting approach, he reiterated, “They added up to zilch.”
“What I felt was that I thought Tom was very kind to him. At one point, [Logan] had a UTI infection and Tom actually helped him. And I think, ‘Well, you have to put up with my horrible daughter, so I have to give you something to reward you.'”
After initially sharing his feelings that Logan died too soon in the final season’s run (in the third episode), it now seems that Cox has fully come around to the fateful decision.
“I had people saying, ‘Oh no, I’m not going to watch it anymore; you’re gone, I’m not going to watch it.’ I said, ‘But it’s called Succession. That’s the whole point of the show. They have to have the succession.'”
When Meyers agreed that the series told the audience what to expect with its title, Cox said to laughs, “Well, people can be so dumb, you know? Really, get it right.”
He closed his remarks about his time on Succession by talking about the actors and crew becoming a family: “It’s probably the best job I’ve ever had.”
Cox was visiting the late night show to talk about his new online acting course for BBC Maestro, where he teaches “his unique methodology into tangible insights and techniques you can apply to your own craft and career,” per the course description.
Cox is famously known for his blunt opinions on acting, and Meyers shared one of the lines he took away from his course: “Just learn your [expletive] lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” Cox added, “That is the basic principle of acting. It’s all bollocks after that. But don’t bump into the furniture and learn your fucking lines.”
The actor is also newly starring in Prime Video’s reality competition series 007: Road to a Million and next up will be learning lines for another patriarch, James Tyrone, in the West End production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
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