No-one was safe from actor Brian Cox’s wrath as he launched into a tirade about terrible films, actors, theatre critics, and politicians at HistFest last night. First on his hit list was Napoleon by Ridley Scott. “Terrible. It’s terrible. A truly terrible performance by Joaquin Phoenix. It really is appalling. I don’t know what he was thinking. I think it’s totally his fault and I don’t think Ridley Scott helps him. I would have played it a lot better than Joaquin Phoenix, I tell you that. You can say it’s good drama. No – it’s lies.”
Then he pondered Phoenix’s rather apt name. “I think he’s well named. Joaquin…whackeen... whacky. It’s a sort of whacky performance.” The Succession star and BBC newsreader and Mastermind host Clive Myrie talked about the loss of historical accuracy for the sake of good drama. “Braveheart is a load of nonsense,” Cox said. “Mel Gibson was wonderful but it’s a load of lies. He never impregnated the French princess. It is a bollocks [sic] that film.”
Cox is currently on the West End playing the lead in Long Day’s Journey Into Night at Wyndham’s Theatre. He has not been best pleased with the theatre critics, who have tried to compare his role on stage with his role in Succession. “It’s stupid! Why make that comparison? It’s so obvious,” he deplored. “Most critics are stupid. They really are. Theatre criticism has gone right down the tubes. You think of those wonderful critics of the past, there’s nobody to match them now. Because they don’t do their homework.”
Cox then took aim at method acting. “Oh no that’s all bollocks. It’s a kind of nonsense. We’re transmitters. That’s what we are as actors. We transmit energy.” In his view, it’s less important to behave like the characters he is playing in his down time, and far more worthwhile to do the research. “You have to do your homework,” he said. “That’s the delight of it, the information you get because you’re reading everything about Churchill and you’re building up a picture of who this person was.”
And don’t get him started on the US – where he currently lives – or its latest presidents. “I think my relationship with America will be coming to a very short sharp end quite soon because of that very thing,” he said, after Myrie mentioned the recently tightened abortion laws in some states, and the possibility of Trump getting re-elected. “It’s very hard to govern America and you certainly don’t need idiots like Trump doing that,” Cox said. “I do think that Biden is a good man but he’s too old.” Will Cox leave the country if Trump gets in? “I probably will,” he said.
