Working man's blues

Between journeys, Brian Cox is having a brief respite in the Shelbourne Hotel.

“I just got in from Iceland which has been standing in for New York in a film called The Good Heart,” he tells me, still out of breath from a lightning visit to RTÉ.
“Tomorrow I’m heading over to the real New York. I haven’t seen my young sons for nearly six weeks. The world of independent filmmaking, well, it’s a tough business. You don’t know where you’re going to end up. And the longer the shoot goes on, the less likely you are to ever finish the film.”
It’s been like this for a while. A versatile actor with a tremendous work rate, he’s usually too busy criss-crossing continents to do publicity for his own films. A CIA officer in The Bourne Trilogy, Leon Trotsky in Nicholas And Alexandra, Agamemnon in Troy and Hermann Göring in the television mini-series Nuremberg; in the international acting market, Brian Cox’s name travels as an Esperanto shorthand for reliability.
In the circumstances, it is hardly shocking to discover that on the morning of September 11, 2001, attempting his regular commute between Broadway and the West End, Cox was already taxi-ing down the JFK runway when he saw a plane hit the second tower.
Often, he admits, his is a thankless task. His taste for eccentric and demanding roles may be apposite for an actor whose screen career began with psychedelic standard The Prisoner, but it has not always aided and abetted his career.
“You do it because you get to do work that is unique. Fulton Mackay told me once: ‘Don’t bother being a star – just be a great actor; and always say your prayers.’”
The 62-year-old has no problem with surviving sans trailer and making his own tea where these ‘unique’ projects are concerned. He is troubled, however, by the state of contemporary film distribution. As any interested observer might tell you, ever since Ronald Reagan presided over the repeal of the 1949 Paramount Decree – thus gifting the bigger studios with the power of monopoly – ‘unique’ projects are increasingly thin on the ground.
“The movies that got me interested in film are the meaty classics like Saturday Night And Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life,” he says. “You don’t see material like that anymore. And the biggest problem is not getting these things made, it’s getting them out to an audience. I wanted to make a film as director one time and I remember asking Gerard Depardieu about financing. He goes ‘No problem. I’ll take a gun, put it to somebody’s head and get you the money. But what then?’ Sometimes your best work disappears into the cracks and the only people who get to see it are you and the director.”
By the early ‘90s, Brian Cox seemed destined for such relative obscurity. A solid working actor with an impressive list of TV and stage credits, a Hollywood breakthrough briefly seemed assured when Michael Mann cast him as Hannibal Lector in 1986’s Manhunter. But it was not to be.
“At the time, I had a young family and I was going through a divorce and I just didn’t want to leave for America,” he says. “You lose a lot doing this job. Over the years, I lost touch with my roots in Scotland. I should have been there more for my son Alan (Cox) when he was doing his first big role (Young Sherlock Holmes) and when he was doing his O-levels. I missed that for Manhunter. I decided I needed to be in Britain after that. I had to put my film career on hold. So I got $10,000 for being Hannibal Lecter and Tony Hopkins got the millions.”
Ten years on, however, Cox found he had done all the Inspector Morse he could handle. And like many classically trained actors before him, he found a lucrative niche as Bad English Guys and cops in Hollywood product. Does he, I wonder, lavish the same attention to detail on Chain Reaction and Super Troopers as he does with King Lear at the National Theatre or David Fincher’s Zodiac?
“Well, my commitment is never any less,” he says. “The most interesting roles tend to be found in independent cinema and theatre, but I would never decry the bigger Hollywood scripts. You’re always looked after. They also want value for their dollar, though they don’t mind making you as comfortable as possible to get good work out of you.”
This is, he admits, partly a hang-up from his impoverished childhood. One of four children of an Irish immigrant family, he was raised by his sister and aunt from the age of 9 when his weaver father died of cancer and his mother suffered a nervous breakdown.
“The school thought I was educationally subnormal, so I used to skip class and go to the picture house,” he recalls.
A huge fan of Marlon Brando and Spencer Tracy, he decided that by hook or by crook, he would break into film. At 15 he took a job with Dundee Repertory Theatre, mopping the stage. He quickly moved up the greasy pole with a scholarship to the London Academy of Music and Drama. A wildly busy stage career soon followed.
“But I always wanted to do film,” he adds. “I believe that film is fundamentally an egalitarian thing. Theatre is all about cliques and an old feudal system. By the time I came along through, the great English speaking cinema was dead. So theatre it was.”
Nowadays, he has far more options on the job front. He’s rightly excited about the forthcoming release of The Escapist, a pounding prison break movie that has given him his most impressive screen role since Manhunter. But between now and the end of next year, he’s scheduled to appear in some nine other titles. Doesn’t he ever get sick of the work or of trekking between Reykjavik and Dublin and New York, I wonder.
“Oh no,” he says. “I think it’s a Celt thing. I had my mitochondrial DNA checked recently and it goes all the way back to Niall of the Nine Hostages. But even more recently than that, my people left Fermanagh in the big wave of migration that used to come from Ireland over to Scotland for the cloth industry. I couldn’t be anything but a nomad, really.”

The Escapist is released June 20