Warning: This article contains spoilers for Season 4 of Succession.
Like some Succession viewers, Brian Cox wishes that Logan Roy would’ve at least made it past episode three.
For the Emmy award-winning show’s fourth and final season, creator Jesse Armstrong decided to kill off Cox’s character less than halfway through the installment and now, the Scottish actor is revealing how he really felt about the plot twist. If you recall, the Roy family patriarch suffered a heart attack during a private jet flight to meet with Matsson over the sale of Waystar. At the time, his passing took many people by surprise, including Cox.
“I looked on it, wrongly, as a form of rejection,” the 76-year-old told BBC’s Amol Rajan. “I was fine with it ultimately, but I did feel a little bit rejected. I felt a little bit, ‘Oh, all the work I’ve done. And finally, I’m going to end up as a New Yorker on a carpet of a plane.’”
“I mean that was so brilliant the way he [Armstrong] did it because there was no set up, we didn’t know what was going to happen, he gets on the plane, he seems hale and hearty, he’s just had these huge first two acts—episode one, episode two we see this in full blast—and then suddenly he’s gone,” he continued.
Brian Cox (left) and Jeremy Strong (right) in Succession season four
David Russell/HBO
Despite wanting to hang around a bit longer, and not actually having watched the scene in question (because his “own death will come soon enough”), Cox ultimately chose not to question the showrunner’s handling of the situation. “There’s no point going down that road, especially with somebody like Jesse, because he’s already made a plan. He decided to make Logan die, I think ultimately too early. I mean he made him die in the third episode. I think maybe he could have died, I would have thought, the fifth or sixth episode. I would have thought that would have been appropriate.”
Of course, there is some speculation that Logan isn’t actually dead. We didn’t see the body, after all. So is it possible he’s still alive, keeping tabs on the fallout? Cox has a theory. “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.”
Well, that would be an ending we didn’t see coming.
