By Stuart Mitchner

Midway through actor Brian Cox’s memoir Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (Grand Central $29), someone asks if he ever thought of playing Donald Trump. After a quick emphatic “No” (“It’s such a bad script”), he explains why he prefers playing Logan Roy, the profane patriarch in HBO’s hit series Succession, which just completed its fourth and final season. “Roy is more interesting because he’s a darker character … He does villainous things but he’s not really a villain. And another thing that interests me about him is that we have this in common: we’re both disappointed in how the human experiment has turned out.”

Cox returns to the same theme in the book’s final chapter, admitting that sometimes “it can be distressingly easy to put on my Logan Roy skin” because besides being about wealth and entitlement, Succession is “about displacement,” about how Logan is “classically displaced, taken from his childhood home when he was very young.” At this point, Cox makes it clear that he’s talking about himself: “I know somebody else who feels displaced, who left Scotland at a young age. Somebody who feels a certain disgust with the rest of the human race, who feels that humanity is a failed experiment.”

Why This Image?

The feeling of displacement Cox mentions may offer a clue to the photograph he picked for the cover of his memoir. Celebrity book jackets generally accentuate the positive. This unguarded image makes you curious about the author’s choice and how it might relate to the show that made him famous. Given Cox’s personal triumph in Succession, his woebegone expression is striking when contrasted to the interior photo of him as Logan Roy, where he looks every bit the confident, all-powerful ruler of a media empire who would have nothing but contempt for an actor who seems to be barely containing a world of sorrow. And although Cox’s narrative is marked by slights, losses, tragedies, failures, absurdities, embarrassing accidents, missed opportunities, and disappointments, it’s also enlivened by humorous turns of phrase and  numerous amusing incidents.

Where’s the Rabbit?

Cox takes his title from a theatrical anecdote. After one actor tries to rouse the cast (“Look, lads, we’re like magicians, we’ve got to pull the rabbit out of the hat”), another actor observes that first “you’ve got to get the rabbit into the hat.” Apply the message of the title to Cox’s book and it’s clear that the “rabbit” he pulls out of the final chapter is Succession, where everything “clicked into place” with “the first read-through” in 2016.

A Painful Displacement

When Cox was offered the part of the “avaricious empire builder,” he was told it was “a one-shot deal” and that Logan would die at the end of the first season. “That’s the story of my career” he thought. “One-season parts.” The prospect recalled the particularly painful “displacement” he experienced with David Milch’s Deadwood, which he spends much of his memoir’s brief final chapter describing. A highlight of the show’s third season is Cox’s vigorous, expansive performance as Jack Langrishe, a Chicago theater impresario and old friend of Ian McShane’s murderously avaricious saloon owner Al Swearengen, the “most extraordinary creation” of a “most extraordinary” series. Cox was looking forward to coming back for season four of “a very happy show,” when he would open his theater with a performance of The Mikado. But “things fell apart” and “the fourth season never happened.” Instead, HBO and Milch agreed to make a film that Cox was approached for a decade later, too late, because by then he’d already committed to Succession.

Although he was disappointed at not being able to rejoin Deadwood and especially lamented the fact that his character “had no real conclusion,” Cox wasn’t about to turn down Succession, not after that first read-through: “The cast as we know them today” had been there “and I’d been blown away by them, every single one.”

Even then, he remained unsure about his future with Succession until a phone call from showrunners Jesse Armstrong and Adam McKay, who made it clear they preferred the dynamic of a situation where Logan survived the first season, remaining “very much on the scene, pulling the strings in ways that are sometimes as confusing to the viewer as they are to the kids themselves.” Which child does he prefer? Is it Shiv, “who might be his equal,” or Kendall, “a monster of his own making,” or Roman, “the dark horse?”

Logan and Al

Admirers of Deadwood accessing YouTube clips of Logan Roy in action will hear echoes of Ian McShane’s weaponized obscenities in the slashing rhythm of Cox’s f-word-driven invective. Whether Logan is unloading on his children or his financial advisors or his rivals, he goes at it with Swearengen’s cutthroat gusto — without actually slitting throats, as Al occasionally does.

One potential benefit of the attention showered on Cox and Succession would be to send new viewers to Deadwood, a work of Shakespearean grandeur in its reimagination of the English language and the American West. Compared to Milch’s visionary take on the human comedy, Succession is much as Cox describes it, a satire about families, dynasties, entitlement, and “a critique of the fact that non-elected individuals can have an effect on policy.” It’s also about Logan Roy “trying to teach his spoiled, entitled children the value of hard work.” As if aware that this account of his “teaching” is euphemistic at best, Cox admits that Roy’s form of instruction “is not always — hardly ever — moral or ethical.”

In fact, the damage Logan does to Kendall, Shiv, and Rom is crueler than anything Al wreaks on his family of enforcers and prostitutes. In “The Best of Logan Roy” and other clips on YouTube, you need only see his children’s stricken faces after he’s blitzed them with taunts that are often savagely personal. The genius of Deadwood’s Swearengen is the fusing of violent energy with the humorous, gloweringly self-aware theatrical ambiance that ultimately inspires devotion and even love among his crew (as the 2018 film makes clear). For all its edgy, unsparing brilliance, Succession leaves the Roy children like so much roadkill in its wake, although the impression is softened by the memorials given in the series’ penultimate episode, so powerfully played by Jeremy Strong’s Ken, Sarah Snook’s Shiv, and Kieran Culkin’s Roman, whose emotional collapse into the arms of his siblings is followed by a mad Quixotic dash into the anti-Royco mob.

Doing LBJ

In his epilogue, Cox mentions The Great Society, a Broadway play staged “prior to Covid” in which he plays “President Lyndon B. Johnson.” When you think of his negative response to the idea of ever playing Trump, it seems all the more remarkable that, at 73, Cox learned 160 pages in three weeks and “really, really enjoyed the piece.” What helped him was the realization that Johnson reminded him of his father (“I found myself channeling my dad into the performance”). It was “exhausting, yes, but the theatre feeds you. It’s that astonishing relationship you can achieve with the audience; it’s the fact that you never get bored, you’re always feeling an immediacy, a sense of a new experience unfolding.” That’s why “I only ever really see this stopping when I die. And when that happens, I can only hope I make a good death, with dignity and grace, with my loved ones nearby.”   

In a brief afterword that helps explain the solemnity of the book’s cover photo, Cox writes, “A life comprises so many fractured elements. The nervousness that accompanies putting pen to paper, trying to illustrate and make sense of one’s life, ultimately induces an inner state of … well … sheer panic.” And with a neat play on his title, Brian Cox’s term for the panic is “A rabbit-in-the-headlights feeling.”