Brian Cox is never one to mince his words when it comes to fellow actors, and he’s gone ahead and targeted his “25th Hour” co-star Edward Norton (“a pain in the arse”), Ian McKellen (“not to my taste”) and Kevin Spacey (“a stupid, stupid man”) in a new interview with The Times of London. Cox, who is promoting his directorial effort “Glenrothan,” even shaded Quentin Tarantino as “meretricious.”
“I’m more egalitarian than a lot of directors, the kind who call themselves visionaries,” Cox said about his own directing style. “I like to honor the actor’s performance. With a Quentin Tarantino film, what you see is all Quentin Tarantino. That’s not me. I don’t want to do that.”
Cox already made headlines for attacking actors when his memoir, “Putting the Rabbit in the Hat,” came out in 2022 and revealed he turned down the role of the governor in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise and was relieved to do so because Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated.” Cox later said he regretted the shade and “was just being harsh” on Depp, adding: “You go for the easy joke. And I went for the easy joke. That was what happened, and I sort of regretted it.”
Perhaps the most viral of Cox’s critiques has been those made about his “Succession” co-star Jeremy Strong. Cox has spoken out against Method acting in various interviews over the years, frequently citing Strong as an example of why the acting style is “fucking annoying.” In an interview with Variety, Cox even floated a connection between Strong’s Method acting and Daniel Day-Lewis since “Jeremy was Day-Lewis’ assistant. So he’s learned all that stuff from Dan.”
Day-Lewis opposed Cox’s thoughts during an interview last year with U.K.’s Big Issue, saying: “I worked with Brian Cox once and got somehow drawn into this handbags-at-dawn conflict [over Method acting] inadvertently. Brian is a very fine actor who’s done extraordinary work. As a result, he’s been given a soapbox… which he shows no sign of climbing down from. Any time he wants to talk about it, I’m easy to find.”
When asked by The Times of London if he reached out to Day-Lewis, Cox said: “No, I haven’t reached out because it’s got nothing to do with Dan Day-Lewis.”
“Dan Day-Lewis, he’s discreet. He never upsets it [the filming process],” Cox continued. “He’s never, sort of… I don’t want to go on about Jeremy, because I’ve got into a lot of problems and he’s begged me to stop talking about him. He’s a good actor, Jeremy. He’s a wonderful actor. It’s just all the bollocks that goes with it. You watch children — they don’t say, ‘What’s my motivation?’ They just do it!”
Cox even put the U.S. on blast during his interview by saying: “In America they don’t like women. They won’t let a woman be president, not in the foreseeable future. Look what happened to Hillary Clinton. The patriarchy is so invasive and so insidious, it’s hard to throw it off. I think the patriarchy is a fucking mess, and it’s the patriarchy that got us into the position that we’re in at the moment, and we don’t learn the lessons. I say, give it over to the women.”
Head over to The Times of London’s website to read Cox’s interview in its entirety.
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