Some ten years ago, Brian Cox turned his back on an award-winning stage career that had included
Titus Andronicus at the Royal Shakespeare Company and
King Lear at the National Theatre and headed for Hollywood. Since then he has cornered the market in bulky, brooding authority figures in such multiplex movies as
The Bourne Supremacy,
X-Men 2 and
Troy.
For Cox, a working-class lad from Dundee, America offered a fresh start from a British theatrical establishment he felt had never fully accepted him. “They don’t see me in relationship to my class,” he told one newspaper a few years ago. “There you either cut it or you don’t. Britain is all about cliques: Ben Elton, Richard Curtis and their set, Melvyn Bragg and his bunch, Trevor Nunn and Richard Eyre and their lot.” But now Cox is back on the London stage not only being directed by Nunn but also starring in Rock’n’Roll, the latest play by Tom Stoppard. It doesn’t get more theatrically top-notch than that.
“Yes, I know,” Cox says with a hearty laugh. “It’s like I’ve been sent to Sandhurst to be made an officer! But I’ve always spoken out about how I’ve felt at the time so I’m bound to get hoist by my own petard. But you don’t get the chance to do a new Tom Stoppard play every day. And I was flattered that he had written my part with me in mind.” He pauses and smiles. “The script describes my character as a bruiser.”
Cox, though a jowly, stocky 60- year-old, is a warmer, more thoughtful presence than that description suggests. He is as articulate and opinionated about the play as he is about the impact of uprooting his second wife, the German actress Nicole Ansari, and their two young sons from their Los Angeles home to do the play at the Royal Court. “My accountant is not pleased either, as British theatre doesn’t pay well,” Cox adds. “Even though my wife also has a role in the play, financially this makes no sense. We’ll have to have a yard sale when we get back and sell the kids.”
In Rock’n’Roll, Cox plays Max, a Marxist philosopher at Cambridge married to a feminist academic (Sinead Cusack). His beliefs are challenged by events in Czechoslovakia, which begin with the Prague Spring of 1968 and Alexander Dubcek’s liberalisation of communism, and end with the Velvet Revolution of 1990. Events unfold through a double focus: that of Max’s former pupil Jan (Rufus Sewell), a Czech dissident in Prague trying to avoid joining the Communist Party, and Max, refusing to leave the Party despite the Russian suppression of Dubcek’s regime.
“It’s a very humanist play about how different passions and ideas influence each other,” Cox says. “The drama reflects how political consciousness has ebbed and flowed through everything from flowerpower and feminism to music. In the West we had protest songs and ‘Make Love not War’, but it was a romanticised kind of politics. In Czechoslovakia rock’n’roll was a genuinely potent force. When I worked at the Moscow Arts Theatre in the late 1980s, I found that my students’ knowledge of English had come from Lennon and McCartney. Liberalisation in the Eastern bloc began through rock music.”
Out of a brief explosion of pop culture in the 1968 Prague Spring arose the later banned group Plastic People of the Universe. Inspired by the arrest of band members in 1976, the playwright Vaclav Havel formed Charter 77, a movement that led to the Velvet Revolution and the election of Havel as the President of the Czech republic.
“Max’s tragedy is that in sticking to his beliefs, he becomes increasingly isolated and seemingly archaic,” Cox explains. “One character in the play in 1990 wonders why Jan wants to revisit Britain. She describes it as having become ‘a democracy of obedience’. I look back at how socialism was sold out long before Blair and I agree. We’re still a classridden, feudal state that likes to pigeonhole people — it’s something I’ve always fought against.”
Cox did so from an early age. One of four children of an Irish immigrant family, he was raised by a sister and aunt from the age of 9 when his weaver father died of cancer and his mother suffered a nervous breakdown. “I was classified as being educationally subnormal, so I dodged off school and went to the picture house and lost myself in movies,” he says. “I got my yearning to be an actor watching Brando and Spencer Tracy.”
He left school at 15 and found work at Dundee Rep mopping the stage. Later, he got a scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Drama. A busy career developed working everywhere from the Birmingham Rep and the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh to the National in the 1970s and the RSC in the 1980s.
He has always been drawn to characters that are uncomfortable in their skin, whether it’s his Olivier award-winning turn as a tormented RUC officer in Rat in the Skull (1984) or the alcoholic father in Dublin Carol (2000). “As a race we Celts are self-critical, we have an incredible sense of pain and of being dominated and subjugated and pigeonholed,” Cox explains. “It’s both the strength and curse of the Celtic personality.”
Cox has also given humanity to such easily demonised characters as a pederast in the US indie film L.I.E, and as Goering in the US TV movie Nuremberg. And before Anthony Hopkins made Hannibal Lecter cinema’s favourite cannibal, Cox played the part in a chillingly low-key manner in Michael Mann’s Manhunter. That film should have been his calling card to Hollywood, but it came out in 1986 during his divorce from Caroline Burt, his actress wife of 19 years, with whom he has a son and daughter.
“After my divorce I wanted to stay in England to be near the children,” he says. “I have no regrets about not capitalising on Manhunter. As my mother used to say: ‘What’s for you will not go by you.’ By 1995 I felt I’d done all I could on stage and I sensed that television was starting to be run by uncreative suits. I’ve always known when to leave a party, so I thought it was time to try Hollywood.”
His brooding presence and rich, measured delivery tallied perfectly with Hollywood’s checklist for the ideal movie bad guy. Cox admits that he made a string of forgettable thrillers “to learn about doing movies”. Three forthcoming films reflect the current mix of his screen career. There’s the mainstream studio film (David Fincher’s true-life serial killer thriller Zodiac), the character-driven indie movie (Running with Scissors, based on a quirky coming-of-age memoir) and the home-grown production (The Flying Scotsman, about an amateur cyclist who broke world records on a bike made out of scrap).
“There’s a prison-break drama that I hope to do in Britain but, even after we’ve secured the finance, there’s the hurdle of distribution,” Cox says. “We still have this Field of Dreams approach to movies in Britain — build it and they will come. It’s all very well having a vision but we need more people who are able to sell a film.”
Cox is well aware that his CV suggests a restless, workaholic spirit. “I come from a family of itinerants and I’ve never felt as if I belong anywhere so I keep moving. That may be a flaw in my character. It certainly didn’t help me as a father the first time around. But now that I have two young ones again, it makes me think that perhaps we should settle down. After Rock’n’Roll I’m not certain what’s coming next. It might be time to make some big decisions.”
Rock’n’Roll, Royal Court, London SW1 (www.royalcourttheatre.com 020-7565 5000), in preview until June 14, open until July 15; then at Duke of York’s, London WC2 (www. theambassadors.com/dukeofyorks 0870 0606623), July 22-Sept 24
