Brian Cox and Logan Roy: It wasn’t too early

SPOILERS but we’re still talking about the finale of Succession, right? I know we are because people are obsessed with why Roman was wearing a Walmart t-shirt and GQ even dedicated a whole article to it. Succession was about the Roy family and who would succeed its hideous patriarch, Logan Roy, who played his children against each other in game for his throne – and in the end, the reason why none of them won his crown is because of how damaged they were by his abuse. 

Brian Cox has been making headlines this week because he told the BBC that he thinks Logan might have died too early in the final season. Per Variety: 

“I was fine with it ultimately, but I did feel a little bit rejected. You know, I felt a little bit, oh, all the work I’ve done and finally I’m going to, you know, end up as an ear on a carpet of a plane.”

While Cox admitted that Logan’s death was handled “in a pretty brilliant way,” he looked on it “wrongly, as a form of rejection.”

Cox also spoke of showing up to his own character’s funeral “on my own volition” to shoot false scenes in order to fake out paparazzi. And the actor also flirted with the idea that Logan could be alive, after all.

“I still believe this, maybe Logan isn’t dead,” Cox said. “This could be part of an elaborate ruse to find out. Well, 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.” 

But when asked if Logan will truly come back from the dead, Cox said, “No… I’m just saying that could have been a supposition.”

Is this… a bit of irony? Because a lot has been made about Jeremy Strong’s immersive approach to his character and the work, contrasted with Brian’s ostensibly cavalier attitude about acting and how Jeremy may have been super extra about the method, but now here's Brian talking about his storyline and internalising it as a “form of rejection” and, well, there is vanity in this too. He too had a hard time letting go after just three episodes of the final season, he wanted to keep going, he wanted Logan to stay in the conversation. 

But was it really too early for Logan to go? 

Not at all. Sticking around and continuing to torment his children, sticking around to tell them they would never be able fill his shoes, is what Logan lived for. Dying, for Logan, meant taking away the one thing he wanted to keep doing. For a man who always controlled the outcome, dying before knowing the outcome was the ultimate loss. His loss was the beginning of all their losses. In the end, no Roy is satisfied. 

Jesse Armstrong and the writers, then, timed it perfectly, killing Logan where it would hurt Logan the most – away from the action, away from his targets, a final terrible consequence for his final paternal insult: skipping his son’s wedding, and attended to by the man he once said was “fathoms beneath” his daughter, accusing Shiv of only being with Tom “because you don’t want to risk being betrayed”.

WELL.

He was wrong about that too. And how f-cking brilliant was it then that, looking back now, it was Tom – and not Ken or Roman or Shiv – who was with Logan as he took his last breaths. Tom was closest to the king when the king went down and that foretold the end. The man who once snatched Logan’s chicken somehow stole his crown with the kind of killer instinct that Logan was always looking for in his own. And he never saw it coming. 

Here's Brian with his wife, Nicole Ansari, in London today.