Dear Gossips,
Can we start the day appreciating Brian Cox and how he rolled up to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert … in style!?! Check him out in his red shirt and jeans over red suede boots, an outfit that Logan Roy would never, ever, ever wear, would in fact sneer at – and he didn’t change for the show either, he wore the same fit for the interview, which was, not surprisingly, a great interview to cap off his run as one of the greatest television characters of this generation. With, frankly, the best and simplest catchphrase:
F-ck off.
To be known by those two words? Two words that almost everyone who speaks English has said at one point in their lives. And somehow over the last five years and four seasons he’s been able to own them?! It’s a magnificent achievement, no sarcasm, and I feel like he’d be proud of it.
To go back to the interview though, Colbert asks Brian at one point what he’ll miss most about Succession and Brian’s answer adds to what he told the New York Times when he said that:
“And that’s what we [as actors] do. We reflect, we’re not it. And I think a lot of actors do not understand that. They don’t understand the responsibility of that position. They think it’s about, “Oh, I just subsumed myself in the character and then I live it 24/7.” A real problem that America has — and I think it’s also what our show is about — is that America is only interested in the pursuit of individualism at the expense of community. When you look at the European theater, it’s all about community and groups who have dug in and have kept going year after year after year. America hasn’t done that. It’s the ensemble, the community that’s important in any project that you’re working on as actors. You have to create the community and you have to behave toward the community; it’s not about your, “I have to do this; I only can do it this way.”
What Brian will miss most, then, is the community, the Succession community. And that doesn’t just include the actors, it’s the entire crew, he singles out the camera operators on the series, and I bring this up because if you’re a real nerd like we are here about the inside baseball of making television, read Variety’s interview with director Mark Mylod about how episode three, season four, the one that just aired, was filmed. They did a 30-minute take on the boat, when the call comes in from the plane and Kendall, Shiv, Roman, and Shiv are trying to process the information. Per Mark Mylod:
“We ended up with this extraordinary ballet between the cast and the camera crew, as the cast just kept going, kept going, kept going, kept going over this half-hour period, whilst the crew were dancing around them to cover it. And the results were — well, you see the results, if you’ve seen the episode. There is an intensity to it. And a huge chunk of that take is what made the final cut.”
There must have been so much delicate coordination happening there I’m not sure they would have been able to accommodate another camera, or more cameras, to film the filming, like documentary style but goddamn that would be something to see.
Mark also confirms that Brian showed up later on during production to shoot “dummy scenes”, scenes that aren’t part of the actual story but having him present on set and in front of the cameras was designed to throw people off of spoilers and he confirms with Colbert that he did the same for Logan’s funeral scene because they actually told him not to come to set and he went anyway, knowing that the paps would be there. Indeed he was photographed showing up for the scene, which led to speculation instead that someone else had died. So basically Brian Cox was willingly papped to protect the secrets of the show. A community king!
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
