Interview conducted by Josh Horowitz
April 30, 2004
Brian Cox is making up for lost time. Outside of creating our first look at the one and only Hannibal Lecter in 1986’s MANHUNTER, the Scottish born actor was content to do his own thing outside of Hollywood for most of his life. But priorities change as do careers and today, Brian Cox is one of the most highly sought after character actors in the business.
In the last two years alone, he’s had key roles in X2, THE BOURNE IDENTITY, THE RING, and ADAPTATION. I spoke to him recently as he was preparing to return to the stage in his native Edinburgh. But don’t think for a second that he’s leaving blockbusters behind, two more of his are set for release this summer, TROY and THE BOURNE SUPREMACY.
Josh Horowitz: Good afternoon from New York.
Brian Cox: Good afternoon.
JH: How are you doing today?
BC: Fine. I’m exhausted. I’ve been rehearsing all day so I’m quite tired. It’s a very dense play. It’s a wonderful version of UNCLE VANYA set in Scotland.
JH: Is there a Scottish take on UNCLE VANYA?
BC: Yeah. It’s set in the 1960s, in the background of the RUBBER SOUL album. It’s all about the culture of the period. Instead of a professor, he’s a TV pundit and it’s really about these people living on this farm on this estate who have spent their whole life in adoration of him, Varick, as he’s called in the play. It’s basically the play. It’s very funny. It’s written by John Byrne, one of our best writers in Scotland. He’s actually married to Tilda Swinton.
JH: Is this your first stab at that quintessential role?
BC: Yeah. I’ve always wanted to play Vanya. It’s so wonderful just to play in one’s own accent.
JH: THE RECKONING is the only film of yours that’s recently been in theaters. Should I be concerned? What are you doing, taking a vacation?
BC: I’m slowing down a bit. My agents keep saying, “you do too many movies.” Well, you get me too many movies. I’m a professional. I’m earning a living. THE RECKONING was actually made four years ago. I didn’t think it would ever see the light of day. I did it as a favor for somebody and also because it was such a good cast. It was a pretty horrendous shoot, a lot of late nights. I was actually really surprised that the film got seen. I thought that it had disappeared.
JH: Sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to what sees the light of day and what gets swept under the rug.
BC: Well exactly. Fox Searchlight owned it and then decided not to go ahead with it and then Paramount Classics picked it up.
JH: Paul Bettany’s name probably has helped it out a bit.
BC: Yeah, that has probably helped it out considerably. I have three films coming out this year all of which are major blockbuster films.
JH: How long has it been since you’ve done theater?
BC: I haven’t done theater in four years.
JH: Is it easy to get back into the swing of it?
BC: It’s quite tiring. It’s much more exhausting than making movies.
JH: I’d imagine the catering isn’t as good as it was on X2?
BC: The catering isn’t as good as X2 but it’s certainly a hell of a lot better than it was on THE BOURNE SUPREMACY. That was in Germany and the food was just awful.
JH: What was being served?
BC: They served knuckle and knuck and knush. I don’t know what it is. Anything with a k usually means it’s the kartufle, the land of the potato. The awful kartufle as I got to know it. It was just ghastly. We eat a lot of potato in this country but they eat it with everything and they make it into lots of pastry and stuff. They do everything with the kartufle, even more variations than one would have thought possible.
JH: Sounds like you are still bitter from the experience.
BC: Yeah. Exactly.
JH: The first line of your official bio says you’re the most prolific Scottish actor of your generation. What did it say ten years ago? Your career has changed significantly in the last decade.
BC: People say, “you’ve done a lot of films.” But I had a lot of time to catch up with. For many years I didn’t do films. I did a couple of films. I did a lot of television. I did one motion picture in 1971. Then I did one in 1975. Then I didn’t do another film until 1986 which was MANHUNTER. From then I didn’t do any movies until 1991 when I did one Ken Loach movie and then I did the two Scottish movies. I had made a decision to leave Britain and go to America in 1995 and I had five movies lined up. I did them because I wanted to make up for all the lost time. I didn’t really care about the quality of the movies. I just wanted the experience of doing them. It sort of paid off.
JH: You weren’t an exceedingly young man then. Why then and there did you decide to make a go of it in movies?
BC: The thing is, if I had been a lot younger and a lot wiser earlier I probably would have gone to America much younger, probably in my twenties but somehow I wasn’t ready for it. I was also married. I had a young family. I couldn’t be away in the same way. And you get caught up in the theater in this country. The theater is a big seducer. Whereas movies are a part of American culture, the theater is a part of British culture. It’s the most popular drama media there is. I did my theater and I got caught up in theater and I had my life in England. I came to America and I did two shows, one on Broadway, one at the Public Theater in New York. They were great successes and out of that I got MANHUNTER. And then I went back to England and my life changed because I got a divorce. So I went to work at the Royal Shakespeare Company, got myself a job and I was there for about three years. Then I went from there to the National and I became a sort of major classical actor. I did Titus Adronicus, I played King Lear. I was doing all that work but I always had this appointment to keep with the cinema.
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And the MANHUNTER film had taken off and become a sort of cult movie. It nearly didn’t happen because there was a bankruptcy involved around it. DeLaurentis went broke and the film didn’t get a proper airing. And then if became this amazing cult film. And of course the best thing that ever happened to MANHUNTER was SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. People rediscovered that whole movie and also me which was great. I got to a point where I exhausted my life here. I just thought I don’t enjoy it here anymore in England. I was living in London and I thought, there’s nothing here for me anymore. I don’t want to become this actor who’s going to be doing this occasional good work in the theater and then ever diminishing bad television. I thought I’d rather do bad movies than bad television because you get more money for it.
JH: And there were some so-so ones at first.
BC: Yeah there were things like THE GLIMMER MAN with Steven Seagal. But that was to do with cutting my teeth, really establishing myself as an American actor which I hadn’t done. I was very inspired by people like Tim Roth and Gary Oldman who I’d known. I just thought, if they could do it, I could do it. I’m actually more useful than Gary. I’m now at a position where I can be a character actor. So that’s what happened. I decided to come and I came and I never looked back. And I started to get the career I wanted to get because my heroes were always movie actors like [Spencer] Tracy. I admire people like [Gene] Hackman and I managed to sort of carve a career going in that direction so I feel very blessed because I did it after 50 which is when most people curl up their toes and decide that’s it.
JH: You’re obviously someone who is very self aware of your career. Now that you sort of did what you set out to do, do you still set the bar higher, saying for this next phase I’d like to try this or that?
BC: The problem is to keep working. The problem is to not feel overexposed and that people still want to employ me. I did a Farrelly brothers comedy [THE RINGER] this year which was a complete departure and I loved it and I’d like to do more comedy. Maybe I’d like to have Walter Matthau’s career now. (LAUGHS) Not a bad career to have. In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies. And that’s the great thing that you can do both in the states. I feel in a very good position work wise. I think I can do the job. I think I can deliver. I think I’ve proven myself at the age of 57. And I think it does take that long for some to come into their own. I’ve got a young child now and I’ve got another on the way so I’ve also got to think about being more in one place at one time.
JH: I heard that you’re not a huge fan of research when it comes to acting?
BC: I don’t mind research but I hate it as a substitute for acting. It’s about the doing of it. My view is, do it, don’t talk about it. It’s ironic because at the moment we are spending five days around a table talking about this play. But a play like UNCLE VANYA demands a lot of talk because it’s a whole different kind of structure but basically most of these movies you don’t want to overblow them. There’s an ephemera about movies which I thing is a healthy thing. It’s gone. It’s away. It’s done. It has a different kind of resonance in a way. But I think people get bogged down in that and a lot of actors research things into the ground and they can’t deliver. I don’t mind doing research but the important thing is to deliver the goods.
JH: I want to talk to you about some of your films. I feel RUSHMORE remains Wes Anderson’s best work.
BC: I agree with you.
JH: Most of your scenes were opposite Jason Schwartzman who was very green then. Does you acting change when you’re acting with someone like that with very little experience?
BC: I think Jason was astonishing because Jason was very ill during that film, a lot of people don’t realize. His concentration was amazing and Wes was so demanding of him. And he never complained. He had a wonderful kind of durability. He’s a remarkable young man and I think he was perfect for that movie. The symbiosis between him and Wes was pretty terrific. It was also a very very good script. It had that quirkiness but it wasn’t so quirky that we didn’t know what the hell was going on which I think sometimes TENNEBAUMS suffered from that. It’s taking you on a journey which is a little but too unexplained. Bill [Murray], I thought was phenomenal. And I personally think he should have gotten the Oscar because that was a truly great piece of acting he did in LOST IN TRANSLATION. I was very sad that he didn’t get it. I think Wes was marvelous on that script. It was a biographical piece so he had kind of been there. I loved that. I had a great time.
JH: I thought Spike Lee’s THE 25th HOUR was one of his best films in recent years.
BC: It’s a great film and it didn’t get the attention it deserved by any stretch of the imagination. There is a great filmmaker.
JH: Do you know it the first day on the set? Can you tell?
BC: Yeah.
JH: What do you see?
BC: Just his organization. He immediately sits you in the right spot. I’ve worked with Spike Lee and Spike Jonze and there must be something about the name Spike, they made you immediately comfortable. They were both scenes in bars funnily enough. And when we were doing all that driving around stuff with Spike Lee, you just felt totally in the world. He is a consummate director.
JH: Your speech at the end of the film was a leap into uncharted territory.
BC: Exactly. It was just astonishing. Before we shot that, we shot another version of that speech because it was a voiceover. We just started to do a little improvising on set and stuff and we found these locations and the whole last speech just got several beats longer than it was in the original script. And David Benihoff who I think wrote a phenomenal script wrote that speech for us after we’d shot it all and it was just wonderful. It was such a bold piece to suddenly to go into that curious road thing, curious dream like sequence at the end but I think it worked. I think that film will stand up. People in years to come will look back at Spike Lee’s work and they’ll say this was one of the great Spike Lee movies.
JH: Not to mention one of the first to confront 9/11 in some way.
BC: That was so wonderful. It was so exceptional that he said New York has changed and he acknowledged that change and he did it in a very bold and absolutely straight on way. I was very impressed by that and I was very proud to be in that movie.
JH: I might be the only person anxious to see TROY more for you and Peter O’Toole than this Brad Pitt guy. Who are most of your scenes with?
BC: I have a lot of scenes with Brad. My first day on the movie was the most nerve-wracking day because it was a day in which I had to kill one of my icons, which was Peter [O’Toole]. On the first day I had to kill him and I was so nervous. I thought I’d covered it up brilliantly. I thought I didn’t show even though I was really nervous. I had to hang around him all day. It was a very simple bit. I hear they cut the line which I think is a shame. There was a wonderful line where he says, “what about the innocents?” and I say, “nobody is innocent.” I think they cut that line which is a shame. It was so marvelous. He was there and we did the scene and then afterwards he said, “how are your nerves?” (LAUGHS) And I said, “how did you know?!?” He said, “I knew.” He is just amazing. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA for me is just one of the great performances of all time so it was wonderful to be with him for that. It was a lot of hanging around but I really liked [director] Wolfgang [Petersen]. He’s such a sweet man. I think it was great script so I think he really was excelling because I don’t think he’d worked with such a great script in a long time.
JH: You just finished filming THE BOURNE SUPREMACY but you’ve switched directors from Doug Liman to BLOODY SUNDAY’s Paul Greengrass.
BC: He’s very good and he’s done it very well. He played a great game. I was worried at times about him because I thought poor Paul they’re going to chew you up and spit you out because I know what Hollywood’s like. Frank Marshall is a marvelous producer. That kind of filmmaking even though its blockbuster filmmaking, there’s a slightly guerilla aspect to it because the scenes have to work on the day. Poor Joan Allen. She’s such a phenomenal actress and she’d never worked in this type blockbuster type movie before. Her concentration was immense so it was wonderful to watch her work. There’s no fat on that stuff. It’s all lean meat. It’s all facts and it’s all harsh stuff. But within that there’s a very fine emotional line about these people who are pursuing a compulsion. The scenes turned out to be great. My part ended up being phenomenal. We went through a lot of problems because the scripts weren’t quite ready and Paul played a tremendous waiting game. He played a great game of poker and he won through in the end. The same with Matt [Damon]. His stuff was terribly monosyllabic on his own because he’s like that character in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR. So much of it is he’s just doing stuff. It’s very difficult and he really did it. He’s such a good guy. He works his ass off.
JH: Will the blockbuster phone take a rest for now or do you have something else lined up?
BC: Well I’m trying to buy a house so I’ve got to earn some money so I’m probably going to have to do something.
TROY opens May 14th. THE BOURNE SUPREMACY opens July 23rd.
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