The world knows Scottish actor Brian Cox as the menacing media mogul Logan Roy in the drama series Succession. His role as the patriarch of the Roy family and the head of the Waystar RoyCo media conglomerate has earned the actor a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama Series and has earned him Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
While Cox seems to have finally gotten his due with the show, he has been the victim of an apparent ‘curse’, which has seen his hard work being swept under the cracks as another actor portrays the same role and wins accolades for it. It has happened to Cox twice, once in 1986 and 2017.
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Brian Cox’s Six Decade Long Career
With over six decades of film, stage, and TV work behind him, it is quite surprising that Brian Cox only won his first Golden Globe Award in 2019 for Succession. He has played a wide variety of roles and has worked with some of the most acclaimed directors in the business.
Brian Cox started his career on the stage at the age of 14, when he joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre. He went on to play a wide variety of Shakespearean characters as part of the Royal National Theatre, with the most notable being King Lear and Titus Andronicus. He has won two Olivier Awards for his work in the theatre.
After featuring in many films, Cox finally got his big breakthrough in the historical films Rob Roy and Braveheart. Though he was not headlining the films, his supporting roles gave him considerable stardom, with Cox even earning a BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Actor for his role as Argyle Wallace in Braveheart.
The Scottish actor then went on to feature in Matt Damon’s Bourne franchise, appearing as Ward Abbott in The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy. He starred as King Agamemnon in the Brad Pitt starrer Troy and featured as William Stryker in X2: X-Men United. He also had a small role in David Fincher’s serial killer film Zodiac, where he shared screen space with prominent actors such as Robert Downey Jr. and Jake Gyllenhaal.
The Curse Of Brian Cox
If Brian Cox had a dollar for every time he gave a great performance only for another actor to play the same and steal the limelight, he would have two dollars. It might not be much, but the fact that it happened twice has led to it being called ‘the curse of Brian Cox’. The Scottish actor even addressed it in his autobiography Putting the Rabbit Back In the Hat.
The term was reportedly coined by journalists Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, as Brian Cox credits it to them in his book. Kermode once wrote in an article for The Guardian, describing the curse,
“‘It’s the curse of Brian Cox,’ the actor writes ruefully, a phrase he credits to my broadcasting partner, Simon Mayo, and me to describe the strange phenomenon of Cox turning in a blistering screen performance only for another actor to win an Oscar for playing the same role in a different movie – something that has happened more than once.”
The phenomenon has happened twice. The first time was for his role as the infamous Dr. Hannibal Lecter (spelled Lecktor in this film) in Michael Mann’s Manhunter, which was the first cinematic appearance of the character. Cox was lauded for his performance, which he based on an actual serial killer Peter Manuel. However, the world knows actor Anthony Hopkins as the definitive version of Hannibal Lecter due to his Academy Award-winning performance in The Silence of the Lambs. Cox was reportedly misquoted by a Daily Mail article in which he arrogantly claimed to have played the character first. This apparently upset Anthony Hopkins.
The curse struck again in 2017 when Cox played Winston Churchill in the war drama Churchill. The film was a disaster at the box office, earning only $5.4 million against a $10 million budget, although Cox’s performance as Winston Churchill was praised. However, the limelight was once again stolen by Gary Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour. While Cox was irked by the film, he spoke about how he saw the event in an interview with The Guardian,
“I mean, Gary’s [Oldman] a great actor, but…You learn not to be attached, to let go. Churchill probably wasn’t the greatest script, but I think the relationship with Miranda [Richardson, who played Clementine Churchill] was second to none.”
The curse seems to have been lifted as the actor finally got his due with Succession, which ended earlier this year.
Source: The Guardian
