Brian Cox calls Succession son Jeremy Strong's Method acting 'f---ing annoying'

Brian Cox is dishing out some fictional fatherly advice for his Succession costar Jeremy Strong.

Cox, who plays Waystar Royco's ruthless founder Logan Roy in the hit HBO series, did not hold back his disdain for the Method acting approach that Strong brings to playing Logan's son Kendall. "Oh, it's f---ing annoying," Cox told Town & Country. "Don't get me going on it."

Cox noted that he considers Strong "a very good actor" and shared that the rest of the cast — which includes Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Nicholas Braun, and Matthew MacFadyen — is fine with the Emmy winner's in-depth process. However, he added, "Knowing a character and what the character does is only part of the skill set."

Randy Shropshire/Getty Images 'Succession' stars Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong

"He feels if he went somewhere else he'd lose it," Cox continued. "But he won't! Strong is talented. He's f---ing gifted. When you've got the gift, celebrate the gift. Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?"

Coincidentally, Cox's interview was published on the same day as Strong's latest GQ profile, which saw the actor address his TV dad's previous concerns about his intense acting style.

"Everyone's entitled to have their feelings," Strong told the outlet. "Brian Cox, for example, he's earned the right to say whatever the f--- he wants. There was no need to address that or do damage control… I feel a lot of love for my siblings and my father on the show. And it is like a family in the sense that, and I'm sure they would say this, too, you don't always like the people that you love. I do always respect them."

In general, Strong noted that he prefers to isolate from his fellow costars so that he doesn't get too casual on set. "It'd be one thing if I was working on Friends or something," he explained. "I worked on a Guy Ritchie movie, and I approached that very differently."

Cox previously voiced his concerns about Strong's all-or-nothing approach while visiting Late Night With Seth Meyers in December 2021. "I worry about what it does to him," he said at the time. "Because you're dealing with all of this material every day. You can't live in it. Eventually, you get worn out."

He was also among those interviewed in Strong's controversial New Yorker profile that was published the same month. "It's the cost to himself that worries me," Cox said. "I just feel that he just has to be kinder to himself, and therefore has to be a bit kinder to everybody else."

Speaking with GQ, Strong said that he doesn't plan on changing up his process anytime soon.

"I'm still going to do whatever it takes to serve whatever it is," he said. "Which is not to say that that is the same thing as riding roughshod over other people. It has to do with autonomous concentration. It's a very solitary thing. I think there's very low impact on others except for what they might want to project onto it and how that might make them feel."

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