Like his character on HBO’s Emmy award-winning drama Succession, Brian Cox is a man of extremes — at least when it comes to his takes on pop culture.
Sometimes the actor has entirely appropriate reads on Hollywood that deserve to be heard — he knows the proper age to write a memoir, he’s not afraid to call Steven Seagal “ludicrous” and Johnny Depp “overrated” in print, he, like the rest of us, adores Keanu Reeves. These perfectly logical soundbites speak to the man’s intelligence and good taste.
And then there are other pull quotes, ones that live in completely obscure profiles from magazines like Haute Living New York that leave us questioning the good judgment of an experienced thespian who could’ve just, we don’t know, said less?
In talking about a documentary project he’s working on that dives into the wealth gap across the pond, Cox brought up the current state of the royal family and, naturally, Meghan Markle’s name got dropped.
“When you look at what’s happening with Meghan and Harry, you go, ‘Well, Harry, there’s an innocence about,’” Cox said. “And with her, too. But you can’t go into a system where somebody’s already been trained to behave in a certain kind of way and then just expect them to cut themselves off. I mean, she knew what she was getting into, and there’s an ambition there clearly as well — the childhood dreams of marrying Prince Charming and all that shit we see as fantasy that could be our lives in our dreams.”
What Cox may have been alluding to is how the royal family’s existence has only exacerbated our obsession with wealth, status, and fame — using Markle’s terrible experience joining it as a cautionary tale, i.e. she thought she was getting one thing and got the complete opposite. But it doesn’t read well and it’s likely to be the topic of plenty of headlines when, in reality, Cox’s closing sentiments on the royal family are much better.
“In my opinion, we shouldn’t have a monarchy,” the actor said. “It’s not viable; it doesn’t make any sense. It’s tradition and all that, they say. I say, ‘Fuck it! Move on!’”