Interview: Brian Cox, actor

Published on Sunday 21 February 2010 11:42

The scene is perfect. Parliament Square on a mid-morning in February the colour of steel wool. The gothic turrets of Westminster making a pincushion of the clouds. Outside Parliament, a smattering of protesters, their placards face down on the ground, pass the time talking, texting, and tweeting.

Inside, six MPs are waiting to find out if they will be charged over their expenses claims, the latest episode in one of the greatest political scandals of the decade. And over the road in the imposing headquarters of the Institute of Civil Engineering, where the Labour manifesto was unveiled in 1997 and scenes from Armando Ianucci's political satire In the Loop were filmed more than ten years later, I'm waiting for Brian Cox.

The Dundonian actor's latest role is probably his closest yet to home. In an upcoming BBC drama, On Expenses, Cox plays Michael Martin, ex-Speaker of the House of Commons. Last June Martin became the first casualty in the expenses scandal when he was forced to resign, the first Speaker to do so in 300 years. Watching Cox play this man, pilloried by politicians and press alike, is a delight. From the minute we encounter him with his regalia – not the Speaker's wig but the Celtic strip and bagpipes – to the way he offers a colleague "a wee drop of the hard stuff" and then proudly produces a plastic bottle of Irn Bru, Cox takes on Martin as he did King Lear at the National. In his hands he becomes the belligerent, growling guard dog of the House, a derobed figure of great tragicomedy whom we mock and then pity, the bumbling, fumbling instigator of his own downfall. "You greedy, ungrateful bastards!" Cox barks at the end to an empty Westminster corridor, eyes bloodshot and darting in his head. "Gorbals Mick... the place where I grew up made the Gorbals look like Center Parcs. I fought my way out and I fought my way into this job."

The similarities between the two men are uncanny, and it's not just their portly silhouettes and gruff, take-me-as-you-find-me manner. Both were born into working-class Catholic families in postwar Scotland, Martin in the west in 1945, Cox in the east a year later. Both came to be defined as poster boys for social mobility, working-class Scots who, against the odds, made it to the top. One found success in the theatre, the other in the theatre of the Commons. And both men, of course, have those voices.

"He used to make me laugh," says Cox over lunch, before doing a spot-on impression of Martin. "Order! Order! That strange accent he had, the funny Glasgow singsong thing. But I actually thought he was a really sad character. There's no question he made errors. In a way it was all too much for him. But the other people, the Douglas Carswells (the Conservative MP who spearheaded a campaign to depose Martin] and the like, all the people who wanted the job anyway, they're despicable. I've got much more contempt for them."

Cox's voice defines him, makes him instantly recognisable. Each word he speaks over lunch comes out like a mouthful of gravel he's been storing in his mottled jowls, that he's rolled around, savoured, and spat out in satisfaction. In the buzzing restaurant of the Institute of Civil Engineering, his voice stands out louder and grander than anyone else's, making his food order sound like a soliloquy from Macbeth. No one bats an eyelid when he walks in, which they surely would if he were one of his Scottish peers, such as Ewan McGregor or Robert Carlyle. Cox just looks like another man in his sixties, conspicuous only because in a sea of suits he's dressed down in a fleece over shirt and tie, hair carefully dyed. But if anyone heard Cox speak, they would look again. In that voice they would instantly find the man who over more than 30 years has taken on characters as complex and disturbed as Manhunter's Hannibal Lecter and Lolita's Humbert Humbert.

We order sparkling water and Caesar salads, his without chicken because he finds it "the most over-rated food in existence". When the food arrives, Cox ends up with my salad but I never get the chance to say so because he is so garrulous. He scoffs all the chicken while I try in vain to get a word in. But Cox is great company: warm, emotionally honest, and very engaged with the world. He is just off a plane from Kolkata, where he was presenting Scottish films to Indian audiences with the British Council and taking Shakespeare workshops. He doesn't seem jet-lagged in the slightest. Quite the contrary. I can't get him off the subject of India for more than ten minutes, plus he won't stop asking me questions ("Are your family from Bengal? How long have you been in Scotland?"), which – trust me – is not typical actor behaviour.

"When I first went to India in 1980 I met Indira Gandhi," he reminisces, shovelling in another mouthful of chicken. "She had just come out of mourning after her son was killed in that plane crash. It was her first public appearance and she came to see me in Macbeth. She was one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met. Also one of the sexiest." He pauses, an old rogue's grin breaking through the crags of his face. "Very sexy woman. She told me they kept going on in parliament about getting colour television. And she said, please, let's get black and white right first." Cox loves this story because for him, it's the tale of all our times. "Everything has moved so fast technically but people haven't moved at the same rate," he later says. "We have no idea what we're doing to ourselves. Simply no idea." Cox seems ambivalent towards Britain, having lived in the US for 15 years. These days he's based in New York with his second wife Nicole Ansari, also an actor, and their two boys, who are just five and eight. "It's interesting coming back to this country now," he says. "There's a real puritanical backlash going on – John Terry, MPs, everything. We're obsessed with people not behaving properly. These are Pandora's boxes. Once you open them you can't get the lid back on."

Cox doesn't believe in good people and bad, which is interesting because he is renowned for playing villains, whether paedophiles, narcissists or Nazis. He sees them all as simply human. "There is a Shakespearean quality about Martin," he says, returning to On Expenses, in which Anna Maxwell Martin plays the American journalist Heather Brooke who investigated the expenses scandal for five years only to be scooped at the last hurdle. "He can't stop it. He was a bit of a scapegoat too. He was harmless, charming. He was no pistol like Betty Boothroyd but he was a character and a good man."

Cox clearly has great sympathy for Martin and I wonder if it's because of their similar backgrounds. "I share his irritation," he continues. "We're so class conscious in this country. We try to pretend we're not but we're as feudal as we ever were. We all play the game, we all go along with it. He played it too, thought 'I've arrived. Here I am, Speaker of the House, a wee boy from Springburn.' Of course you haven't really joined because the creeps won't let you. The ones with the silver spoons in their mouths." It's clear Cox isn't only feeling incensed on Martin's behalf now. In fact part of the reason he likes America so much is that it doesn't share Britain's class obsession.

He goes on. "You see a lot of these characters in Scotland of my generation. They have achieved a certain status but there's this frailty that goes with it because they don't believe they really deserve it. There's an element of feeling like they'll get found out. Michael has that nervousness: 'They'll take it away from me.' And of course that's what happens. It's a very Scottish thing, that. It's the weak aspect of the Scot but it's also the most human and appealing part. It's where the humour comes from." Does he identify with what he describes as weakness? "Yes," he replies. "Personally I feel that any minute now I'll get rumbled. Get to the back of the class! I've always had that. It's in the DNA." This, it turns out, is why Cox is a renowned workaholic. He needs to keep proving to himself that he really can do this.

Cox had a notoriously difficult childhood. His father was a mill worker in Dundee and his mother brought up five children. "In our tenement my three sisters were in one room, my father and mother in another room, and my brother and I in the bed recess in the kitchen." His earliest memory was pressing his ear up to the family gramophone, hearing music, and liking it. He thinks he was about nine months old. Cox was the youngest child and when he was eight his father died of cancer. His mother, who had severe mental health problems, suffered a series of breakdowns and was in the end institutionalised. Cox was brought up by his oldest sister – now 80 and still living in Dundee – and his aunts.

"She was very ill when she had me," says Cox of his mother. "She nearly died when I was born. I apparently pulled half her womb out when she gave birth. She had to have a massive hysterectomy. We both nearly died. And I think she had a whole series of miscarriages before me. We have no idea of the life that women led then. No idea." Many years later, Cox's first wife had stillborn twin boys. They were together for 18 years and have two children who are now in their thirties. "My wife was obviously in a frail state afterwards, all these hormones going crazy, no baby to feed but your body still going through it all. She went to seven months." Cox speaks in a calm, subdued voice, never looking away from me. He remembers telling his mother how devastated they were afterwards. "She looked at me and said 'well we've a' dropped bairns'. That was the attitude. It was fatalistic, about accepting what you're up against. That's the kind of thing you deal with. That's your history."

By the time Cox was a teenager he was struggling in school and on his way to becoming a troublemaker. But everything changed when he got a job sweeping the stage at Dundee Rep. The boy who for years had been scurrying off to the cinema to feed his voracious appetite for films whenever he got the chance was blown away by the theatre. "It was an epiphany," he says. "They were the sweetest, nicest people. Classless. Nobody judged you. You were just welcome. I worked there for two years and had the best time of my life."

The stage opened its doors first but it was the film set Cox hankered after. His approach to acting seems almost to have functioned as a form of therapy. He is obsessed with understanding his characters and bemoans the fact that he doesn't get to do so enough anymore. "The thing I've always tried to do with my work is nuance," he says. "Now everything has got so polarised and so crude and I find it tough. I find it hard. When you look at something like Avatar it's technically phenomenal but it's not a great film."

Being an older father has also had a huge impact. Cox's marriage to his first wife ended because of his focus on his work, which in turn impacted on his relationship with his children. Now, he's getting a second chance with his two small boys. "It's taken me a long time to understand one's role in relation to one's children," he says. "It's not something I necessarily had with my older children. I was too busy with my career and ambition. Now I see how important my presence is. I've been home the past six weeks and we've been doing a lot of therapeutic work with the children. Our eldest boy had learning difficulties. He's fine, incredibly smart but it's his motor skills. Ironically he has exactly the same difficulties I had when I was his age. My brain was always faster than my body." When Cox was a boy there was no-one to help him, though. I suspect it must be healing for him to be able to give his son what he never had? "I feel very strongly that I want to complete certain things with my kids that weren't completed for me," he agrees.

Now 63, Cox still has no idea where he wants to end up. He has just been named Rector of the University of Dundee but can't see himself returning to Scotland permanently. Neither, though, does he seem enamoured with the US. "I find it hard to know where to live," he admits. "I'm such a transplanted individual. My wife is the same. It's a real problem. As I get older I find it hard to know where to hang my hat. I think I'm one of life's visitors. Permanently passing through." Acting has, in the end, been his home. "I've been blessed that way," he says. "I always feel sorry for people who don't know what they want to do. My advice to anybody is whatever you do, follow your bliss. Just follow your bliss because it's the only thing you can do."

On Expenses is on BBC 4, 9pm, Tuesday.

This article was originally published in The Scotsman on 20 February 2010