Brian Cox (born 1946) is the Scottish actor who first played Hannibal Lecktor on screen, in Manhunter, and later played Logan Roy in Succession.
Quick Specs
| Born | Brian Denis Cox, June 1, 1946, Dundee, Scotland |
| Trained at | Dundee Repertory Theatre (from age 14), then LAMDA (graduated 1965) |
| Horror centerpiece | Dr. Hannibal Lecktor in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), the character’s first screen appearance |
| More horror | Richard Morgan in The Ring (2002), Mr. Kreeg in Trick ’r Treat (2007, released 2009), Tommy Tilden in The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), the voice of Death in Good Omens (2019) |
| Stage | Olivier Awards for Rat in the Skull (1984) and Titus Andronicus (1988); King Lear on a world tour for the National Theatre (1990 to 1991) |
| Screen awards | Primetime Emmy for Hermann Göring in Nuremberg (2000; Emmy 2001); Golden Globe for Succession (2020) |
| Honors | CBE in the 2003 New Year Honours; Rector of the University of Dundee (elected 2010) |
| Not to be confused with | the physicist and TV presenter Brian Cox, born 1968 |
Who He Is
Brian Denis Cox was born in Dundee on June 1, 1946, the youngest of five children in a working-class Catholic family of Irish and Scottish descent. (The middle name matters: he is not Brian Edward Cox, the particle physicist from Oldham, born in 1968, and nothing about CERN or D:Ream belongs here.) His mother, Mary Ann, was a spinner in the jute mills. She had several severe breakdowns and spent long periods in hospital, where she was given electroshock treatment.
His father, Charles, ran a grocery shop and gave his poor customers a lot of credit. He died of pancreatic cancer when Brian was eight, within three weeks of the diagnosis, and left the family in debt. On Thursday nights, before his mother’s widow’s pension arrived, Brian went to the chip shop for batter bits. “Poverty is what makes you a socialist,” he said on Desert Island Discs. He was raised largely by his elder sisters.
At 14 he got a backstage job at Dundee Rep and, in his words, “knew I belonged there from day one.” He left school at 15, went to LAMDA at 17 on a full grant, and graduated in 1965, the year he became a founding member of the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in Edinburgh, appearing in its first show. He made his London debut as Orlando in As You Like It in 1967, first appeared on TV in The Wednesday Play in 1965, and played Trotsky in his first film, Nicholas and Alexandra (1971).
He married the actress Nicole Ansari in 2002, his third marriage. He has four children, including the actor Alan Cox. He describes himself as a democratic socialist. He left Labour for the SNP in 2015, though in 2022 he said he didn’t consider himself a Scottish nationalist and favored a federal settlement.
The Work, and What He Did in It
Through the 1970s and 1980s Cox was a stage actor first. He played Henry II in the BBC’s The Devil’s Crown (1978) and Burgundy to Laurence Olivier’s King Lear on TV (1983). In 1980 he played an ex-convict opposite Peter Cushing in Hammer House of Horror. He won the Olivier Award as RUC Inspector Nelson in Rat in the Skull (1984) at the Royal Court, and made his Broadway debut in Strange Interlude in 1985. He was a decorated London leading man with no film career to speak of.
That’s who Michael Mann cast in Manhunter (1986), the first screen adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel, Red Dragon. Dino De Laurentiis changed the title over the objections of Mann and Cox. William Petersen plays the profiler Will Graham and Tom Noonan plays the killer Dollarhyde; Cox plays the imprisoned murderer Graham goes to for help. In this film, and only this one, the character’s name is spelled Hannibal Lecktor, not Lecter. It was the first time anyone had played him on screen, five years before Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.
Brian Dennehy, who was considered for the part, recommended Cox and sent Mann to see him in Rat in the Skull in New York. Cox is in only three scenes, and that was Mann’s design: the character was so magnetic that he wanted the audience almost not to get enough of him.
Cox based his Lecktor on Peter Manuel, the Scottish serial killer who was the bogeyman of his Dundee childhood and conducted his own defense at his trial. “He was so rational and so apparently empathetic, but actually, there was no empathy, and that’s how I saw Lecter,” Cox said, “a man with a huge part of personality missing.” Mann wanted Lecktor to ask for a phone like a man in a suite at the Dorchester ordering high tea. Cox opens his first scene with his back to the camera, to draw the audience in. The result is the quietest, most ordinary and most believable of the screen Lecters, a man in a white cell with nothing about him that announces the horror. The film flopped, grossing about $8.6 million on a reported $15 million budget, and Cox went back to the stage. The performance’s reputation was built later, as Manhunter was reassessed.
The stage years that followed were his peak. He won a second Olivier for the title role in Deborah Warner’s RSC Titus Andronicus (1988), taught and directed at the Moscow Arts Theatre School, and toured the world as Warner’s King Lear for the National Theatre in 1990 and 1991, a tour he wrote up in The Lear Diaries (1995).
Film came back in the 1990s. He was BAFTA-nominated for the BBC’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1992). In 1995 he played Killearn in Rob Roy and Argyle, William Wallace’s uncle, in Braveheart, and became a Hollywood regular: The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss the Girls, The Boxer and Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. He won the Emmy as Hermann Göring in the TNT film Nuremberg (2000; Emmy 2001) and was nominated again the next year for a guest run on Frasier. He was the corrupt CIA man Ward Abbott in The Bourne Identity (2002) and its sequel, the anti-mutant colonel William Stryker in X2 (2003), and Agamemnon in Troy (2004).
In Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) he plays Richard Morgan, Samara’s adoptive father. It’s two scenes with a big job to do. Naomi Watts’s Rachel tracks him to his horse farm on Moesko Island, where his horses drowned themselves under Samara’s influence and where he shut the girl away in the barn loft. He insists she was evil, and rather than help Rachel he electrocutes himself in the bath in front of her.
In Michael Dougherty’s Trick ’r Treat (made in 2007, released on video in 2009) he is Mr. Kreeg, the Halloween-hating recluse with locks all over his door who sets his dog on trick-or-treaters and gets a home visit from Sam, the sack-masked little enforcer of Halloween’s rules. The film’s ending reveals that Kreeg, as a young man, drove the bus in the “Halloween school bus massacre”; the younger Kreeg is played by another actor. In André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) he takes a true horror lead as Tommy Tilden, the veteran coroner who runs the family morgue with his son (Emile Hirsch) and carries out the overnight autopsy that drives the film.
He played Winston Churchill in Churchill (2017), and then, from 2018 to 2023, Logan Roy, the founder of Waystar RoyCo, in HBO’s Succession. Logan dies in the third episode of the final season. The role won him the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Drama in 2020, and he was nominated three times for the Emmy. It also cost him something he valued: “I loved the fact people didn’t know what to say because I had done so much variation. But now Logan Roy is it.”
He is a busy voice actor too: the Edinburgh detective McLevy on BBC Radio 4 from 1999, across many series; the Ood Elder in Doctor Who; Death in Good Omens; the villain Scolar Visari in the Killzone games; and the director Starkweather in the game Manhunt (2003), which has nothing to do with Manhunter. He played Sydney Newman, the BBC executive who created Doctor Who, in An Adventure in Space and Time (2013), and recorded an unabridged Dracula.
Cool Verified Facts
- On Trick ’r Treat he made a deal with Dougherty: “I’ll do it, but I won’t learn it, I will come to the set, and you just tell me what to do… Like doing a silent film.” He called it “one of the most liberating experiences I’ve had on film.”
- He designed Kreeg’s look as a tribute to John Carpenter: “I wanted to look like a cross between John Carpenter and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead… So I got a nose, and I got that look.”
- Logan Roy was first written as born in Quebec. Cox has told how a co-star later told him it had been changed to “somewhere called Dundee, Scotland.” “Well, that’s where I was born!” he said. Jesse Armstrong told him, “we thought it’d be a little surprise.”
- He and the physicist Brian Cox have met. The actor admitted the shared name “irked me at first,” then decided it was “one of those curiously strange accidents.” The night before one joint TV appearance, a hotel refused to check the physicist in because its system insisted there were two Brian Coxes.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
On the inevitable Hopkins comparison, he says: “It’s like comparing two Hamlets, or two Lears.” Hopkins “stood in the middle of the cell, and was completely upfront about who he was. I start the scene with my back to the audience, so I can pull them in. I’m trying to seduce the audience in an entirely different way.”
He doesn’t claim to be a horror fan. “I wasn’t really one for horror films, actually, at all… I was much more about reality,” he said. He remembers Peter Cushing insisting on the Hammer House of Horror set that Hammer’s films were “not horror, they’re fantasy films,” and half-adopting the line himself.
He teaches drama and carries a photo of himself as a little boy in a high chair. “I always say to my students, ‘Always carry a picture of yourself as a child because that’s who you are.'”
He has written three books: Salem to Moscow (1992), The Lear Diaries, and the memoir Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (2021), which he narrated himself.
Why He Matters
Brian Cox created one of horror’s defining characters, and created him differently. Before Hopkins and before Mikkelsen there was Cox in a white cell in 1986, in three scenes, playing the most famous cannibal in fiction as a polite, plausible man with nothing where empathy should be. Every later Lecter answers, or breaks from, a performance most of their audience never saw.
He is a performer of great versatility, best known for gruff authority figures, benign and malign, and for finding an eerie humanity in even the most loathsome of them. Lecktor, Göring, Richard Morgan, Kreeg, Stryker and Logan Roy are that sentence, role by role. Horror kept casting this classical actor, from Manhunter through The Ring, Trick ’r Treat and Jane Doe, and he kept saying yes on his own terms. No other actor’s career holds both the first Lecktor and Logan Roy, more than thirty years apart, with a King Lear in between.