Succession star Brian Cox has made it no secret that he’s not a fan of method acting. In fact, he once referred to his co-star Jeremy Strong and his acting method as “f**king annoying”.
But it seems that Cox’s latest role in Dexter: Resurrection has tested this stance — but not in the way you’d think.
Method acting is a theatre technique where actors completely immerse themselves in their characters in their real lives in order to genuinely feel the emotions and motivations of their character. For some, it’s a way of truly giving an authentic performance. But if you ask Brian Cox, it’s an isolating pursuit.
However, as he stepped into the shoes of Don Framt — a wheelchair-bound killer past his killing prime known as the New York Ripper — the character’s sinister energy was hard to stomach.
“I am not in any stretch of the imagination a method actor. That’s not what I do. I don’t believe in it. But this character – more than any character I’ve ever played – frightened me,” Brian explained exclusively to TV WEEK.
“The character I created had a life of its own and an energy that even I was sometimes appalled at.
“It was a scary experience of what was coming out. I just thought, where is this guy coming from? What is this creature that I’m inhabiting?”
Where method actors chase total immersion, Cox found the opposite problem: Framt was too monstrous to fully get inside.
“Normally as an actor, you pick and choose what avenues you go down creatively to bring it to life. With Framt, I couldn’t do that. He was such a monster that I felt I couldn’t get into his psyche completely. I just had to be this extraordinarily crazy, obsessive guy. It was a weird situation, but I found the whole thing to be exciting.”
In season one of Dexter: Resurrection, we saw glimpses of Framt but it’s not until this season that we truly begin to see his bone-chilling motivation — a killer who can’t physical kill anymore but still can’t seem to quiet his murderous urges.
All things considered, it’s quite the admission for an actor who has spent years as method acting’s biggest haters.
Cox made his feelings about it public in 2021 when he gave a comment to The New Yorker for a profile about his on-screen son in Succession, Jeremy Strong. Cox said that he worried about Strong when he watched what his co-star put himself through to play the character of Kendall Roy. Then, in 2023, he called Strong’s process “annoying” whilst also praising him for his incredible acting chops.
Admittedly, none of this has seemed to both Strong, who told GQ that Cox has “earnt the right to say whatever” he’d like.
But Framt may have given Cox a small taste of what Strong has been chasing all along. The difference? Cox didn’t go looking for the monster. It found him.
You can watch Dexter: Resurrection seasons one and two on Paramount+.
