As I leave the office, my editor wishes me luck. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!” she says. A moment later, the deputy editor asks where I’m off to. To see Brian Cox, the actor, I say. “Oh!” she says, with a rather-you-than-me look. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!”
Cox has played grumpy for going on 60 years. All sorts of grumpiness – idiot grumpy (independent candidate Bob Servant in the TV comedy of the same name), world-weary grumpy (school principal Dr Nelson Guggenheim in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore), psychopathic grumpy (the first movie incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter), egomaniacal grumpy (Robert McKee in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation) and, of course, brutal grumpy as media mogul Logan Roy in the TV series Succession. In recent years, he has often appeared on chatshows being grumpy about the state of the world. In 2022, he published his hugely entertaining memoirs, in which he was grumpy about method acting, useless directors, vain thesps, useless politicians, the church, capitalism, cancel culture, you name it. He was also fabulously indiscreet – Steven Seagal, whom he worked with on The Glimmer Man, is “as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen”, Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”, Tarantino’s work is “meretricious”, Edward Norton is “a nice lad, but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director”, while Michael Caton-Jones, who directed him in Rob Roy, is a “complete arsehole”.
