Brian Cox said on Wednesday that he felt “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong killed off the HBO show’s fearsome patriarch Logan Roy “too early.”
Logan’s death, while anticipated, came in the third episode of the HBO drama’s fourth and final season — much earlier than many viewers expected.
In a BBC Two interview with Amol Rajan, Cox said, “I was fine with it, ultimately, but I did feel a little bit rejected. You know, I felt a little bit like all the work I’ve done [is being overlooked] and finally I’m going to, you know, end up as an ear on a carpet of a plane.”
It was “ultimately too early” Cox said of his character’s demise, which he would have preferred to happen in the fifth or sixth episode. Despite his shortened run on the season, HBO will still submit him as Lead Actor at the upcoming Emmy Awards.
Since Logan’s death, his ambitious children Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) have continued their bitter battle to fill his footsteps and take control of their family’s media empire.
In the BBC Two interview, Cox also floated his “supposition” that Logan might have pulled one last, incredibly manipulative trick by only pretending to have died to test his “not serious” offspring.
“If you think about it, from Logan’s point of view, he has to find out, how are his children going to behave when he dies, what will then happen? And the only way to do that is to fake his death and actually, at some distant point he’s observing the chaos that is following,” the actor said.
Cox helped Armstrong pull off the surprisingly sudden death by appearing on the set of his own character’s funeral in the penultimate “Church and State” episode that aired Sunday. While he is not in the episode, he skillfully helped the public from reaching the obvious conclusion about who was in the coffin.
The interview airs Wednesday on BBC Two. Viewers in the U.K. can watch online here. The series finale of the Emmy-winning series airs on HBO on Sunday.
