Acting Strong
Resilience for Stage Ready, Mind Ready Artists. Inspiring interviews with successful actors and artists exploring how they maintain positive mental wellbeing and resilience through the highs and lows of their career.
Created by Generation Arts. This production is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Hosts: Ali Godfrey & Unique Spencer
Acting Strong
Brian Cox: losing everything at 8, the art of persisting, Succession and lessons from a 60-year career
Content Warning: There is a brief mention of attempted suicide in this episode.
What happens when resilience becomes a way of life? Brian Cox, the award-winning actor known worldwide for his portrayal of Logan Roy in Succession, chats to Ali and Unique and takes us on a masterclass journey through his extraordinary 60-year career.
Having grown up in working-class Dundee, Brian shares how losing his father at eight years old and his mother's subsequent breakdown became the foundation for his remarkable resilience. "When you lose your father and your mother, rejection is very easy," he reflects with characteristic directness. "You learn not to dwell. That's the reality. You just have to deal with it." This early hardship transformed into a profound liberation that shaped both his artistic approach and his politics.
Brian speaks candidly about global fame arriving late in his career through Succession and his mixed feelings about losing the anonymity he valued for decades. His passionate defense of theatrical traditions – particularly his disdain for microphones and emphasis on vocal projection – reveals a craftsman dedicated to preserving standards in an evolving industry. "Being real or being natural is not being truthful," he asserts. This distinction between truthfulness and naturalism forms the cornerstone of his artistic philosophy.
Perhaps most moving is Brian's commitment to mentoring young actors, describing it as "passing the baton on" out of deep respect for his profession. His reverence for theatre as "the one true church" and Shakespeare as "better than the Bible" demonstrates why he considers acting a noble calling that illuminates the human experience.
Whether you're an aspiring performer or simply fascinated by resilience in creative life, Brian Cox's insights offer a masterclass in persisting through adversity with integrity, clarity of purpose, and unwavering dedication to your craft. Listen now and discover why, after six decades, Brian Cox remains one of our most respected and vital artistic voices.
Hosts & Guests:
Ali Godfrey (Host)
Unique Spencer (Host)
Brain Cox (Guest)
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Produced & Edited by: Ali Godfrey
Acting Strong is brought to you by Generation Arts and this production is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Hello everyone, you are listening to Acting Strong. It's a podcast that helps explore resilience for stage-ready, mind-ready artists, brought to you by Generation Arts
Ali Godfrey:The lineup of guests have all tested their resilience, so come see what you can learn. We are your hosts.
Unique Spencer:I'm Unique, a professional actor
Ali Godfrey:and I'm Ali, founder of Generation Arts.
Unique Spencer:In today's episode we're speaking to Brian Cox, Golden Globe, Emmy and Olivier Award winner and a legend of the stage, film and television for nearly 60 years. Raised in a working class family in Dundee, Brian's early life shaped his grounded outlook and fierce commitment to supporting the next generation. From iconic roles in Succession, X-Men 2, the Bourne movies, Troy, Braveheart, Churchill and Manhunter, to a lifetime of powerful performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brian's story is one of resilience and passion for his craft. This production is supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Let's get started.
Brian Cox:You're called Unique.
Unique Spencer:I am, yeah.
Brian Cox:Well, you are unique, probably.
Unique Spencer:Thank you, so much
Brian Cox:That's an amazing name for your parents to give you Unique,
Unique Spencer:Only child as well
Brian Cox:Yeah Well, you are unique, probably.
Unique Spencer:Thank you so much.
Brian Cox:That's an amazing name for your parents to give you unique, only child as well.
Brian Cox:So oh, and you're unique. You're unique. Does that mean there won't be any more? No, because she's the unique.
Unique Spencer:No more coming, just me.
Brian Cox:This one's the unique one, so there's not going to be any more.
Ali Godfrey:First of all, thank you so much for joining us. It's a real honour to have you here. You've had an extraordinary career across 60 years, from Royal Shakespeare Company to Succession, golden Globe, Olivier Award, Emmy along the way. How does success sit with you now and does it feel different to you now than it might have done earlier in your career?
Brian Cox:The thing I find difficult is the loss of anonymity, which is the hardest thing. And you know, I mean I've been very lucky that I've avoided being identified in any sort of way because, oh you are. People kind of go, oh you're in, you were that guy, and they get it wrong. Usually I said no, I wasn't in that. But I was, was in that. So that was my career up until well about five years ago. But now everybody knows who I am and I slightly resent it. I really preferred when people just knew me as an actor and I did my work and they were very nice about it or, yeah, usually very nice about it. I've preferred that situation to the situation I'm in now, where everybody seems to know who I am.
Brian Cox:So I find it I don't know, I find it a bit sort of I long for my anonymity
Unique Spencer:yeah, yeah, and I think it's a little bit different now because this generation has Instagram and they have all of those things that they sort of love to to have the fame and and the clout around. Um, and so what was your experience like when you did go viral? Because, obviously, technology's changed. From when you first started, it was like books, where people would find actors, and now they're finding you online and you've become like a meme and a viral moment.
Brian Cox:Yeah, it's a little inconvenient, to say the least, I don't know. I mean, one has to be respectful and you can't actually not be disrespectful when people are. You know, I've just done this play in the West End and there were always people out there every night and people were usually very, very nice and very considerate and you find that people are like that. You know, on the whole, you just have to deal with it and deal with it with grace really.
Unique Spencer:Over time. You've seen obviously different generations sort of come in to the acting game and you've obviously seen the acting game change a lot from, you know, it being very much like stage work and there being a lot of rep companies and stuff like that, to then sort of moving on now to like TV and film being the sort of catalyst of like where actors get famous. Did you ever have like a preference of just wanting to do stage work?
Brian Cox:Well, I've just done the theatre. I don't like mics. I still believe in the old style of. You know, I grew up with the people like John Gielgud and Paul Schofield who were great actors, and the reason they were great actors is they knew how to fill an auditorium and still be naturalistic, still keep their truth, and I'm a teacher as well. So the thing that I demand is clarity - clarity of purpose where you're going, what your intention is, what the scene is about. Being real or being natural is not being truthful. There's a difference between truth and being natural.
Unique Spencer:Well, I'm in rehearsals right now, so I'm going to take that all on board when I go back into my rehearsal room.
Brian Cox:Shall I say something, and so you should, and so you should,
Unique Spencer:I think it's true, and I remember when we were doing our voice lessons and that's exactly what our teacher used to say you're not going to use mics If you go to the Olivier, you need to be able to fill it.
Brian Cox:Well, they're now using mics, everywhere they use mics. I mean, I was the first actor to walk on stage at the Olivier in the 70s, wow. And you know there was a real problem because of the concrete, because it was a brutalist architecture and there's no wood. You know, I kept saying you've got to have wood, you've got to have something which reverberates, something which carries, and there's none. So there's a sort of bottom, an eight-foot square that you can act on in the Olivier stage and that bottom, an eight foot square that you can act on the Olivier stage, and that's it.
Brian Cox:If you go elsewhere, you, you know it's really difficult and understanding the measure of the house is important. You know, playing something like which I've been just playing in the Haymarket, the theatre is just so brilliantly designed that you don't need a lot of effort. You need clarity of purpose again, but you don't need a lot of effort to be heard and to keep that going. You can be quiet, you can be loud, as long as you deliver it out. Even something which is highly personal can still be animated. In a way, it's about doing the work. If you don't do the work, fuck all happens. And it's about the work, it's only about the work. I've been very lucky. This cast I've just worked with is probably the best cast I've worked with in probably 50 years because of their attention to what they were doing and their delivery, and so you've got a lot of these wonderful young actors who are just doing incredible work. And, of course, when they do work, everybody inherits it.
Brian Cox:You know, everybody gets it and it's the best feeling,
Ali Godfrey:yeah I wondered if we could go back a bit to your childhood. I know you've spoken about your childhood in Dundee and you said in your book that it was a happy childhood up until the time that you very sadly lost your dad when you were eight, and your mother's struggles afterwards - would you be willing to share a little bit about how those experience might have shaped you as a person, but also as an artist?
Brian Cox:well. I think they certainly shaped me politically more than anything else. Both my father and my mother started their life in in the jute mills of Dundee. My mother was a spinner. My dad, my, was a batcher, which was he loaded the bales. That's how he started. One of the ironies of life is that his sister and her husband was in the First World War. He was killed and she got a stipend. They gave her some money and she immediately passed it on to my father. She bought him a shop. She wanted him to go into the shop and work in the shop. My mum actually ran the shop to start with, very briefly, but she was giving birth at the same time, so it was pretty hard to my three elder sisters. So my dad. He became very good and he was also very good with figures. So he had a very good life and during the war, because he was a grocer - he was what was known as a received occupation, which meant that he had to be supplying because they people needed to eat, so they needed grocery shops and he made quite a bit of money as a result. Not intentionally, it's just what happened. He made about 28 grand, which was a hell of a lot of money in 1945, but his way of doing it was to give money to his struggling businesses, which he did. He literally gave most of that money away to struggling businesses.
Brian Cox:There was a great bone of contention between my mother and my father. My mother thought my father was far too generous. Her great call was charity begins at home. And my dad didn't accept that. He said I'm not, that's not who I am. If I'm in a position to help, I will help, and I'm in a position to give, I will give. And there was a great tension between my mother and my father towards that part. Because my father had been successful. My mother just felt that people were taking advantage because he gave credit to people and they were poor. They couldn't pay their bills. So my dad ended up being the pater familias to a working class ghetto in Scotland, in Dundee.
Brian Cox:But then he was not feeling very well. He was having stomach upsets and stuff and he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he died within three weeks of his diagnosis. So he went into hospital and when he died it turned out we got a copy of his bank book and he only had £10 in the bank. That was it. But my mum was. She was not well. She felt very guilty about my father's death. She felt that she had hounded him a bit and so she couldn't live with that guilt so she tried to commit suicide. I remember I came home one day and she said she was cleaning the oven but there was a very strong smell of gas and she really had a huge, massive nervous breakdown. Her nervous system collapsed and then the worst thing was that, in order to treat her, they gave her electric shock treatment which destroyed a lot of her memory and it was very difficult for her to get a lot of her memory back.
Brian Cox:So the weirdest thing was I didn't realize it, but I was incredibly liberated by what had happened. I mean, I was an orphan. Basically I was fine. I just got on with it. You know, I learned very early on to get on with it. I learned not to dwell. That's the reality. You just have to deal with it. And actually I was very liberated.
Brian Cox:I had a great childhood. I mean I had a happy childhood, but then I was very freewheeling. You know, I got a bit irritated Occasionally. My mum would go off when she got better and she came back. And you know, and I came back to live with her, she would go off and I wouldn't have a key and she would arrive home very late and I'd be sitting on the stairs still waiting again. You know that kind of thing. But you know what gave me a sense of the politics of the time, of what was happening to him, the fact that he wasn't helped and his health, of course, that wasn't helped. But at the same time, as I say, I felt very liberated.
Brian Cox:I felt I was free
Unique Spencer:and I was I was going to say just on that subject of your life sort of changed, how did you then get into acting?
Brian Cox:Well, I always wanted to be an actor. It goes right back to my very beginning childhood, when I was about three. My dad was very social. He was a quiet man. He was quite a quiet man but he was quite social. He was good like that.
Brian Cox:On Hogmanay, which is a big, great festival in Scotland, the celebration of the new year and what that requires. You know, I remember being summoned at one o'clock in the morning to do my turn, you know, because I had to sing a song and I'd be in what was resembling my pyjamas or a dressing gown and I'd come out and I'd sing a song. But I always remember the because there would be. I mean it was, it was a tiny flat but it was packed with people, but I always remember the collective consciousness that comes into play. I think it's why religion has such a strong hold on people, because there is something about, when you're with a group of people, what that dynamic does to you and what that does to you in terms of receiving. You know you're there to celebrate something, you're there to honor something and there's an instinctive part of us which understands that it's so old and it's so ancient, but it's there. We do have that in us and I just realized that, whatever that was, whatever that atmosphere was, I wanted to, I wanted to capture it, I wanted to have part of it, I wanted to have something of it and therefore I just thought, wow, what is that? And that was a natural show-off because since I was a baby, so I then decided that it would be acting and then, of course, I went. I went to the pictures. We'll call the pictures in Scotland we don't call them the movies, we call them the pictures. And I used to go to the pictures and I went all the time. In my hometown there was 21 cinemas and of course it was double features. You went from Monday to Wednesday in one cinema, double features, and then Thursday to Saturday in another cinema, double features, and therefore you could see as many as eight films in one week. And I did. I would sneak out and go off, and when my parents had gone I was on my own, I could just do it. You know, I just used to go to the cinema. So that is where my acting came from and of course, it culminated in me going to drama school in the 60s.
Brian Cox:But my first thing was I got a job. I was just 15 when I started at Dundee Rep and I've always been very lucky in the sense that certain people have recognised me and respected me, even at a very early age. I had these two teachers One was called George Hackett and the other was called Bill Dewar, and Bill was an amateur opera singer and he also used to direct little skits on in the school and I would take part and he knew that this job was going at the local rep because a boy who had that job, who'd been in my school before me, like for three years before me, he was going to drama school, so his job was available. So I went down for this meeting and it was quite funny actually, because I went down and I went into the front of the theatre and this woman in a very broad Dundonian accent says what are you doing? I said I'm here an interview. Well, you've got to go in the back. You want to get to the front, you've got to go to the back. You can't get to the back front, you've got to go. If you want to get to the back, you've got to go. If you want to get to the front, you've got to go to the back. Go to the back and then get to the front. And I'm just at the front. I said, oh, okay, fine. So I went around the back and said, trying to find the front. So I didn't know. I mean, it was close that I walked up because that was when all these the dressing rooms and the costume room and all of that was off the close on the left hand side.
Brian Cox:But actually there was two people having a huge row screaming at one another. One was an actor that became quite famous, so he was there and I was trying to get past him and I finally got past and I got, I got to this landing which was my point of departure for the front. So there was a guy, an actor, smoking a cigarette and he looked at me and he said are you all right, darling? Well, I'd never been called darling in my life. So actually I thought this is really rather nice and I thought these two are knocking hell out of one another and this guy calls me darling. I said so, it's a place of contrast it should be interesting to be at. So I thought, okay. So then I went for my interview and, um, he was very nice. He was a, a New Zealand guy called John Henderson and, uh, he was talking away. And then he finally said to me so do you like classical music? Now, as it had happened, I knew nothing about classical music, but but the previous week our music teacher, Brad Cato, had played a piece of Verdi and he played the trumpet marks from Aida. So he said, do you like classical music? I said, oh, Verdi.
Brian Cox:nd said what I said I love Verdi. He said Verdi. I said I think Verdi's really good. You get a good tune with Verdi. He gives you good tunes. They said oh really. I said yeah, I said so. Which particular Verdi? Oh, trumpet March from Aida, it's fantastic, I love that and it was complete bull.
Unique Spencer:I love that.
Brian Cox:Anyway, I got the job and I started it and I was 15. And then I worked, worked there, for I worked there between 61 and 63 when I went to drama school, so it was really two years altogether.
Unique Spencer:Has there ever been anything that shocked you? Because, like just you saying about the opera and stuff and you're not really knowing much about it, like I remember my first job out of drama school was at Glyndebourne and I was in a Mozart opera and I had no idea what was going on, like I was just like
Brian Cox:what were you doing in a Mozart opera?
Unique Spencer:I was playing Berenice um you were singing no, I wasn't singing, I was just an actor.
Unique Spencer:They'd made me an actor, this um, and it was in La Clemsa di Tito, and basically I was this beautiful woman called Berenice who gets banished um from the castle, basically. And then I just walked out and done like a little bit of acting no words, no, nothing. But the whole thing was in Italian, like it was all in Italian, and I had to call my Italian friend to come and watch it, to tell me what was going on, because I had no idea. But it's still one of my proudest moments because I was put so far out of my comfort zone, would you say. There was ever a moment for you, when you got into acting, that you'd been taken so far out of your comfort zone and you were super proud.
Brian Cox:No, I can see that and I have a similar kind of thing. But the thing that got me was when Bill Davis said to me would you like to go to a voice class? And I had never heard of it. I said I don't even know what that is, I had no idea what that was. Well, he'd been at LAMDA at and, uh, he had said well, there's a young woman coming up this weekend and she's gonna take some voice lessons, give some voice lessons, would you like to come? I said, yeah, sure, great, I'll go. Yeah, good. So I went and she was called Christine Link later and she was astonishing, absolutely astonishing. She literally made me. I said, well, I want to go where she is, you know, because she was so great. So I went to LAMDA, I auditioned and I got in and then blew me. Five weeks after I got there she left, she went to America and I didn't see her again for another 20 odd years.
Brian Cox:So it's funny, that's funny
Ali Godfrey:I'd love to talk to you about resilience, because it's something that we talk about on this podcast a lot and it seems to be a thread that runs through your story, from your upbringing that you've talked about, and then, obviously, just sustaining your career for 60 years nearly. How would you define resilience for yourself?
Brian Cox:Well, I think resilience and persistence go hand in hand. You know, it's like that thing, when you're doing an exercise, you think I can't do anymore and you just think, no, come on, do it. And then you do it and it's okay. But there's a point where you feel you're breaking. You know this is too much. And then you go, oh okay, and you and you never know, see, we never, we never, we always underestimate our own capabilities. We, we underestimate what we are capable of. You know, and that stuff, which is not always to the fore, it's there, it's just in you. And especially if you've got a history and it looks like now I look at it, I thought, oh Christ, I had a history. You know, I didn't think about it at the time because at the time I just had to deal with it. I mean, mean, I lost my mum, virtually lost. My mum lost my dad, my sisters were going off and I was on my own.
Brian Cox:I think resilience, yes, but it's persisting, it's just. You know, it's like getting over that hump that you know you just have to, and then the next hump arises and it's all. It's all about persistence. I mean, I think, as I've seen actors come and have wonderful careers and then they're history, they're gone, they're no more, and that's the most important thing is just to stay the distance, and it has to do with choices of work, having a sense of what you want and what you need and what will serve you, and never losing that. You have to have that constantly. You have to have a sense of you know you're playing a lot with the ego here, but and that's tricky but in a way it's what serves you. What serves you is what's important and makes you move. You know, just travel, as it were. Yeah.
Ali Godfrey:And so it's sort of like you're choosing work from a kind of a really authentic place.
Brian Cox:Yeah, and also, it's also important who you work with. I mean, I've been very lucky. I've worked with, to my mind, two of the best directors ever, you know, and they were fantastic, and nobody matches them. Nobody matches them. I haven't met anybody who matches them, just in terms of their vision, in terms of their understanding of human nature, and that's the one thing that you've got to understand. You've got to understand how we human beings tick and what makes us tick and what our aspirations are and what are the things that get us into trouble and what are the things where we push ourselves in the wrong direction. I mean, that's all part of the path, really.
Ali Godfrey:Yeah, and who are your two favourite directors?
Brian Cox:My favourite directors. One was Lindsay Anderson, the director of Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was a film director but I worked with him. And the other one was michael elliott, who's marianne elliott's father who was stunning, a stunning director, and I did I mean I, we worked together for over 15 years and he sadly, he died. He was only 52 when he died, but my last production was Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, which was a demanding role, you know.
Brian Cox:I had my legs strapped up, my back.
Ali Godfrey:Oh, wow
Brian Cox:yeah, I had my legs strapped up and it always took me 20 minutes to get the circulation back in my leg at the end of the show, you know. And on a matinee day we had a four o'clock matinee and the show was four hours, an eight o'clock night's performance, and they expected me to go straight on. I said you're fucking joking. I said I've got to get my leg back. So I made the director, who was living in Edale at the time he came in every Saturday to make the speech that we were slightly delayed for the second show. Yeah, we were slightly delayed. I'm just saying, yeah, it's back, my leg's back. It's okay, we can call the five.
Ali Godfrey:And I just wanted to ask you about the new play you're doing this summer.
Brian Cox:Oh yeah,
Ali Godfrey:Written by James Graham, Make it Happen. It's actually on at Dundee Rep Theatre, where it all started for you. And then also you're going to Edinburgh International Festival and you're playing Adam Smith, the ghost of Adam Smith, who lots of people say was the father of capitalism. I just wondered if there was any overlap there in terms of playing Adam Smith and also playing Logan Roy in succession.
Brian Cox:Yeah, it's a play that I kind of got involved in almost by accident. It's about the financial crisis of 2008. And it's basically about Fred Goodwin. But then I suggested to Graham.
Brian Cox:I said you know, what would be interesting is to have Adam Smith come from the past and realize what the hell's going on and realizing how people have got so hidebound in their really in their language.
Brian Cox:You know, like Thatcher irritated me well, she irritated me anyway, but she did irritate me because of the endless misquoting of of that. But and then, when you look at him because he talks about capital and in a way I was I've been thinking about him recently a lot actually because he talks about capital and now capital has become a dirty word. But when he meant capital, he meant fair exchange. You know, you buy from someone, they sell you, and there's something they have that they sell you. So there's a quid pro quo situation and he was very concerned with that. He was also very annoyed. He's in the play about people misquoting him, people getting him wrong, and a lot of people got him wrong. But also, in fairness to the people, now it's changed. His ideas for capital were good ideas, but it's now become a very, very controversial word capital, because of capitalists and the capitalistic society.
Brian Cox:But now, when it gets beyond and that's what Succession deals with you know the notion of entitlement. You know my favorite line in Succession was when I said to them you're not serious people.
Ali Godfrey:Oh, that was a low blow, oh, that was harsh.
Brian Cox:Well, it's true, they weren't serious.
Unique Spencer:Then the truth hurts.
Brian Cox:Well, it's also because of entitlement they feel they're in that position, but he's worked for that position. That's why I wanted him as a self-made man. I didn't want him as having inherited anything. It was his world. It's a right-wing world. It's not a world that I particularly choose. But then I realised that he went right because of what his, you know, I thought while he was a young man he probably had a vision of something and it didn't measure up because he went to Canada and he was beaten by his uncle. That's why he's got the scars on his back, never explained. It's never explained, and that's the greatest strength of the writing.
Brian Cox:So it's left to the audience to make their decisions. You know, and you make your own decision about that, and I find that really such a healthy and such a correct attitude in terms of creating the drama. And at the end, and of course, because of the way I played it, I earned the line you know by that episode, which was, I think, the penultimate, my penultimate episode, I learned that you know that you're not serious people, because I can say that to them, because they clearly weren't and that was a problem I, I think, in the show, because they killed me off and I and I get people say, oh, they've killed you off why? And I said, well, have you? Do? You know the title? You know it's called succession. So I said, well, you've got to see something. Success in succession.
Ali Godfrey:You've got to see someone one of the reasons that I'm so happy and grateful that you're on this podcast is that you've always come across to me as someone who really cares about social justice. You, you're passionate about politics. You fight the good fight, but also you teach, you mentor young artists and you give back, which is so rare. What is it that drives you to when you, when you really don't need to, which is so rare? What is it that drives you to when you, when you really don't need to, to give so much of your time and energy to supporting young actors?
Brian Cox:well it's, it's passing the baton on. You know, it really is about passing the baton on and passing on standards. I mean I'm probably a bit vainglorious in that way, but I, I do have standards, you know, and I think I know what I'm talking about. After 60 odd years, I should know what I'm talking about. I still fuck up, but I mean, you know, and it's out of respect for your profession, I love my profession. I love it so much and I want everybody, I want people to act. I'd like the world to act.
Brian Cox:I think when you act, you find out about life, because you find out about how people take what they do, why they do it, how they can't do certain things, what you know, what their problems are, what their sticking points are, all of that and that's, that's the story of humanity. I believe that the one true church because I'm not, I'm an atheist now the one true church is the theater. That is the one true church to me, because that is the theater of life. It's about life, it's's about life, and that's what you reflect. You reflect life, what we go through, what we live with, what we deal with, and it's a great profession and it is a noble profession in that way and I always go back to Shakespeare. I mean, shakespeare is so astounding, I mean one of the great things. Even though I'm a Scot, I still speak English occasionally. You know, Shakespeare is just incredible. Everything in Shakespeare is just. You can't believe it. It's better than the Bible, because it's so true.
Unique Spencer:What bit of advice would you give to young actors now, or to yourself, if you were starting out now?
Brian Cox:It's persistence. It really is, it's, you know, persist with your vision, clarify your vision, your vision. And persistence and clarification. You've got to understand what you're doing and why you're doing it and what it means. You know, that's all part of that, but and that's and of course there is the individual relationship to that not everybody feels the same and that's that's life, that's true, but it is about persisting with the dream and the vision when you are choosing a role or preparing for a role, should I say are there any sort of rituals that you do or things that you have to tick off to know that I've done the work?
Brian Cox:It's about experiencing the moment and living with the moment and living through the moment and knowing why do I want to play that part and not that part? Well, I don't want to play that part and not that part? Well, I don't want to play that part because it's an old fart. That part's also an old fart, but he's an old fart with dementia, you know. So that's. You know those kind of choices. I mean, I've got a couple scripts just now which do not fill me with at all excitement, by very good people too, and I'm going. Well, where is it? Where's the role, you know? I mean, there's a role, but where is it in terms of the great scheme of things, you know? So I think it's the work. It's just about the work. You've got to do the work. You know, if you don't do the work, there's no point you know what does the work look like to you, though well the difficulty I have and I was learning my lines but I found a way around that now.
Brian Cox:But you know, it's just understand what you're doing and understand the magnitude of what you're doing. You don't have to live with that. You go oh yes, it's all big, but just occasionally it's good, because what makes 1,800 people sit in a theatre and go focus? That's a magical thing and that's what you have to have respect for and you have to live up to that. You've got to live up to it and that requires persistence, just getting on with it, doing it, doing it again and again and again, and it's always different. It's never the same. The problems are different. You know it's never the same.
Unique Spencer:And how did you deal with rejection when he was coming up?
Brian Cox:Well, when you lose your father and your mother, rejection is very easy. You know, it's just. It's a kind of minor version of all of that. You know loss is loss is, rejection is also loss and therefore I dealt with it. It's a reality of the profession, you know it's. You know doctors differ, it's a whole. You know not every doctors differ, it's a whole. You know some people one man's meat and another man's pot, all of that shit you know.
Brian Cox:So in a way you just have to persist again through. You've got to live through that and deal with it, respect it. You should respect it. You should respect what's happening to you. And there's also a plus in that you do discover things about yourself in those situations which are always helpful to you as a creative artist. But I don't dwell on that kind of thing, I just get on with it. It's moving on. I mean, the thing about acting is it's moving on. You start at the beginning of an evening and you move on, you move on through. You don't dwell, you just keep moving. And I think that's really what we do. You know, I just had somebody said oh, he sent me a message saying you're the hardest working entertainer since James Brown.
Brian Cox:I thought oh, that's nice.
Brian Cox:Never thought of myself as under James Brown. But I'll buy that
Unique Spencer:I'll take that one.
Brian Cox:Thank you, thank you Thank you. I'll take that one
Unique Spencer:Amazing. Thank you so much, brian, honestly. Yeah, fantastic it's really incredible to have this moment with you.
Brian Cox:All right.
Ali Godfrey:Thank you so much. Thank you so much, it's been amazing.
Brian Cox:All right, nice to talk to you, take care.
Unique Spencer:Bye-bye. Each one can teach one, so keep acting strong.
Unique Spencer:Subscribe, spread the word and turn on your notifications
Ali Godfrey:Each guest brings their own take on resilience. So take what lands, leave what doesn't, thank you.
