Sarah Snook Says Brian Cox Had a ‘Habit of Going Into’ a ‘Terrifying’ Rage on ‘Succession’ Set to ‘Jolt the Energy’ and ‘Rustle a Few Feathers’
Sarah Snook said during an interview on Times Radio that her “Succession” co-star Brian Cox had a habit of outbursts on set fueled by his Type 2 diabetes. Snook, who recently won an Emmy for playing Shiv Roy on the final season of “Succession,” said Cox’s voice could get “terrifying sometimes” during these moments of rage.
“He has a habit of sometimes going into a false — or could it be real, who knows? — diabetic rage,” Snook said. “I think part of it’s a little of trying to just jolt the energy of the set and rustle a few feathers, get it going and moving faster. The quality of his voice can be very terrifying sometimes. Thunderous.”
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Snook is not the first “Succession” cast member to bring up Cox’s set outbursts. Kieran Culkin once said in an Esquire video interview that Cox could get into screaming fits much like his character Logan Roy, although the tones were obviously much different.
“The screaming, both of them with the screaming,” Culkin said. “But with Logan it’s terrifying and with Brian it’s hilarious because there’s no actual weight behind it. Even when he’s frustrated and he yells something, it makes everyone chuckle. He’s hungry and impatient.”
Cox himself once admitted on ITV’s “This Morning” that “yeah, I do get hangry because I’m diabetic” when Culkin’s comments were brought up.
As for Snook, she also told Times Radio that she got worried during the making of “Succession” that her career would be pigeonholed into playing characters similar to Shiv.
“When you are known for a particular role internationally, there is a fear, I suppose, as an actor, that you might get constrained to roles like that,” Snook said. “The things that had come in during the time that I was shooting tended to be of Shiv nature. For me personally, that’s just so far from who I am as a person — and not that I wanted to play myself. But I wanted to be able to stretch my wings a bit and kind of say, there’s a little more round here.”
Snook said she nearly turned down “Succession” because of her initial fears that the role of Shiv might not be “interesting enough to want to play.”
“She wasn’t familiar to me in a way that I felt that I could bring something that was great to the role that I found interesting enough to want to play,” Snook said. “I didn’t know, if being the only younger female in the cast at that time, whether I would be a prop and tried to be made to the beautified version of me that the female character could be, then just sort of pushed to the side. I’m not interested in playing roles like that, so I was fearful of things being trapped”.
Head over to The Times’ website to read more from Snook’s interview.
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