Brian Cox has never been one to mince his words and he clearly isn’t going to start now, as we meet during a break from rehearsals for a new play about Johann Sebastian Bach. “I was not a Bach fanatic,” he says of the baroque German composer. “I mean, all that jiggly-jiggly stuff.” What’s more, he has actually played Bach once before, back in the 1980s, in a TV film. “It was, shall we say, a bit dry.”
But having recently finished in a role that has made him quite possibly the world’s biggest TV star – the fiendish patriarch and merciless media mogul Logan Roy in Succession – Cox was keen to get his feet back on a stage. “I’m a glutton for terrible punishment,” he says. “I’m at a certain age now and I just wanted to know if I could still learn lines. And it has been difficult because we’ve done it in such a short period, with a play we are constantly changing, constantly cutting.”
