Sarah Snook says Brian Cox was as terrifying behind the scenes as he was in character

"I think part of it’s a little of trying to just jolt the energy of the set and rustle a few feathers," Snook said of Cox's off-set Succession "rage[s]"

By Emma Keates | February 14, 2024 | 4:39pm

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Sarah Snook says Brian Cox was as terrifying behind the scenes as he was in character

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Brian Cox and Sarah Snook in Succession Photo: Hunter Graeme/HBO

At this point, we know that a lot of the acting on Succession happened while the cameras weren’t rolling. Jeremy Strong is, of course, the most notable proponent of this particular method, but he was far from the only one. It’s really no wonder the Roy family always felt so abundantly authentic and lived in—at some point, those characters must have become real entities that possessed the bodies of their respective actors. That’s not true, but it feels like it has to be at least a little bit true, right?

Take Brian Cox, a notorious method acting hater, who still channeled Logan to rile up his co-stars in between scenes. “He has a habit of sometimes going into a false—or could it be real, who knows?—diabetic rage, where he’ll go [growl] all of a sudden,” said Sarah Snook in a recent Times Radio interview (via Deadline).

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Kieran Culkin, who plays Shiv’s brother Roman, has said things to a similar effect about Cox’s tendency to yell on set when he was feeling a little hungry. “The screaming, both of them with the screaming,” the actor said of the differences between Cox and his character (via Esquire). “But with Logan it’s terrifying and with Brian it’s hilarious because there’s no actual weight behind it. Even when he’s frustrated and he yells something, it makes everyone chuckle.” (“Yeah, I do get hangry because I’m diabetic,” Cox, who suffers from type two diabetes, responded on ITV’s This Morning.)

Snook, who recently scored a well-deserved Emmy for her portrayal of Logan’s daughter Shiv, seems similarly bemused by this behavior. “I think part of it’s a little of trying to just jolt the energy of the set and rustle a few feathers, get it going and moving faster,” she said. “The quality of his voice can be very terrifying sometimes, for sure. Thunderous.”

Snook and Culkin aren’t the only Succession actors to call out Cox’s volume. J. Smith-Cameron, who played Gerri, has also said that Cox was occasionally “terrifying” to work with, while Justine Lupe, who played Willa, said he was “incredibly intimidating on and off camera.” “That being said, he’s also one of the more kind people that I’ve interacted with on set,” Lupe added (via Deadline). “He was always so supportive and sweet.”

But while it sounds like it’s been a challenging task for the cast to let go of these characters that were so deeply ingrained in them, Snook, at least, is ready to move on. “When you are known for a particular role internationally, there is a fear, I suppose, as an actor, that you might get constrained to roles like that,” Snook also told the Times. “The things that had come in during the time that I was shooting tended to be of Shiv nature. For me personally, that’s just so far from who I am as a person—and not that I wanted to play myself. But I wanted to be able to stretch my wings a bit and kind of say, there’s a little more round here.”