Brian Cox has spent three seasons playing the scheming media maestro Logan Roy on Succession. Now he’s making his own power plays—telling all when it comes to his five-decade career in his upcoming memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. Following a previous excerpt in which he took jabs at Quentin Tarantino and Michael Caine, Cox is exploring the high-profile roles he didn’t play in a new excerpt published by GQ on Friday.
Although Cox has won awards and universal fanfare for starring on Succession, he almost appeared in another hit HBO series first. “I’m often asked if I was offered a role in Game of Thrones—reason being that every other bugger was—and the answer is, yes, I was supposed to be a king called Robert Baratheon, who apparently died when he was gored by a boar in the first season,” Cox writes, adding, “I know very little about Game of Thrones so I can’t tell you whether or not he was an important character, and I’m not going to google it just in case he was, because I turned it down.”
The actor goes on to explain that while “everybody involved earned an absolute fortune” by the time the series ended, the money Game of Thrones originally offered him “was not all that great, shall we say.” Cox also knew that the character he was up for, whom Mark Addy eventually played, was killed early in the show. “So, I wouldn’t have had any of the benefits of the long-term effects of a successful series where your wages go up with each passing season,” Cox says.
Before that offer, Cox had worked with showrunner David Benioff on 2002’s 25th Hour, written by Benioff and directed by Spike Lee. In his book, Cox calls Lee “one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with,” partly because of his ability to collaborate with costar Edward Norton. Cox writes of Norton, “He’s a nice lad but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director.” The Golden Globe winner then praises Lee’s ability to hear Norton’s script ideas without using them. “And the fact that he did it without upsetting Ed, who after all does have a reputation for being a little volatile, was really quite an achievement,” Cox says.
That brings us to Harry Potter, or as Cox calls it, “Harry fucking Potter.” He was up for a role in that franchise as well, likely Mad-Eye Moody, the role that Brendan Gleeson ultimately won. Cox writes that “Brendan was more in fashion than I was at that point, and that’s very much the way of the world in my business, so he got it. Also, he’s much better than I would have been.”
When it comes to turning down the role of the governor in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Cox writes that he has “no regrets,” about Jonathan Pryce playing the part. “It would have been a money-spinner, but of all the parts in that film it was the most thankless, plus I would have ended up doing it for film after film and missed out on all the other nice things I’ve done,” Cox explains.
He then takes aim at franchise star Johnny Depp, referring to him as “so overblown, so overrated.” Cox writes, “I mean, Edward Scissorhands. Let’s face it, if you come on with hands like that and pale, scarred-face makeup, you don’t have to do anything. And he didn’t. And subsequently, he’s done even less. But people love him. Or they did love him. They don’t love him so much these days, of course.” He then quips, “If Johnny Depp went for Jack Sparrow now, they’d give it to Brendan Gleeson.”
Cox also teased the possible end of Succession, although nothing has been confirmed by HBO. “Hopefully we’ll do a fourth series,” he writes, “and that’ll probably be it, but it will have been a great run.”
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat will be released on January 18, 2022.
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