Brian Cox Reveals His Favorite ‘Succession’ Line
Brian Cox is celebrating the “poetic” dialogue of famed HBO series “Succession” even months after the series finale aired in 2023.
During an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” the Emmy-winning actor confirmed that he indeed has a favorite line as Logan Roy. The scene in which Logan tells his children, played by Kieran Culkin, Jeremy Strong, Alan Ruck, and Sarah Snook, that they are “unserious people” marks a beloved memory for Cox.
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In the series, Logan says, “I love you but you’re not serious people.” Now, Cox is breaking down the line reading.
“Well actually it was my favorite line that I had to say throughout the whole show,” Cox said. “I love that line and I just thought, ‘Why didn’t I say that earlier?’ They were damned unserious most of the time.”
In the aftermath of a shocking final season twist, Logan’s estranged son-in-law Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) “wins” Waystar Royco from the blood Roy family heirs.
“I think that Logan had already planned that,” Cox said of his character’s schemes. “He could see that those children were not going to add up to anything. Well, they didn’t add up to anything! They added up to zilch.”
The star is currently teaching an acting course on BBC Maestro, where he explained his go-to advice: “Just learn your fucking lines and don’t bump into the furniture.”
Cox said, “That is the basic principle of acting. It’s all bullocks to me after that.”
However, Cox admitted that he “was not a good learner” when he started out memorizing scripts early in his career.
“It’s the discipline,” Cox said. “I’m about to do ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night.’ I’m going to be doing that in London in the new year and I’m dreading it, because I’ve got to go through the learning lines process. And as you get older, the synapses are not quite working in the same way.”
He summed up of the acclaimed award-winning “Succession” scripts, “If there’s a poetic element to the writing, you immediately go to that. That’s why Shakespeare is so great because it’s structured so wonderfully well. Free prose is very hard to learn, especially when you’re doing interrupted lines. It’s not necessary. But anything that’s got a poetic bent to it is helpful.”
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