Brian Cox reports on the death of the Roy family patriarch in the final season of successor came too soon.
The Emmy-nominated actor shared his opinion on the show’s decision to deliver the show Logan Roy’s long-awaited death during the third episode of the fourth season of the hit HBO show while speaking to BBC News‘Amol Rajan before successoris the finale.
While Cox admits Logan’s death happened in a “pretty brilliant way,” he said he “wrongly” viewed it as a form of rejection. He also suggested that it would have made more sense to do this later in the season, either in the fifth or sixth episode.
“Ultimately I was okay with it, but I felt a little rejected. You know, I kind of felt like, oh, with all the work I’ve done and I’m going to end up, you know, as an ear on the carpet of an airplane,” he told the BBC.
In an interview on successor podcastSeries creator Jesse Armstrong said he picked an early episode so the series could explore the implications for the Roy family.
“He would always die. “It felt like this had to happen,” Armstrong told host Kara Swisher. “That was always ingrained in that when we decided it was going to be the final season. Occasionally when I was mad about the ending I thought most tragedies end in death at the end and we go back and look at that as a form. But it was really that feeling of wanting to see how they would do after that that prevailed.”
While Armstrong is adamant that Logan is dead, Cox surmises that his character’s death may have been a ruse, before clarifying that he “just said it could have been a guess.”
“This could be part of an elaborate ruse to find out. Well, if you think about it, from Logan’s point of view, he needs to figure out how his children will behave when he dies, what will happen then?” he said. “And the only way to do that is to fake his death, and in fact at some point in the distance he watches the chaos that ensues.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cox shares how he helped keep the plot details surrounding his character’s death from coming to light before the series-changing episode aired.
He remembers shooting his character’s funeral scenes over a year and a half ago and was told he didn’t need to shoot any more fake scenes to prevent anyone from suspecting that Logan had died. Aware that paparazzi might be suspicious if he wasn’t seen on set, Cox said he went “of his own volition” so that Logan could be seen alive, at his own funeral.
To prevent the spoiler from getting out, the scene was also dubbed a service for James Cromwell’s character Ewan. Takes place during the show penultimate episodeThe funeral episode was directed by Mark Mylod, who said having Cox on set “was great fun”.
“It felt strange Shakespearean to see that ghost hanging around the church. “Brian agreed to come along to make it look like it was Ewan’s funeral,” he continued. “We asked him to stop outside the church at a very public time so paparazzi or people looking for breadcrumbs would see him emerge as if he was coming to Ewan’s funeral. So he hung around the church with us too, kind of like a smokescreen to keep the secret.”