It’s been six weeks now since HBO’s Succession released “Connor’s Wedding,” the third episode of the show’s fourth season. If you’ve been living under several rocks that themselves live under, whatever, a boulder, you might not be aware of what happened in that episode—or how it pertained to the day-to-day life of series star Brian Cox.
On the other hand—and since we’re now down below the first paragraph break, —you do probably actually know by now that “Connor’s Wedding” is the episode where Cox’s character, Roy family patriarch Logan, abruptly drops dead, blowing up Succession’s whole world in the process. Certainly, Cox himself feels that he’s waited long enough to talk about it: He gave a pretty in-depth interview to the BBC this week, expressing his own personal belief that, maybe, just maybe, the show went Logan-less a bit too soon.
While being very clear that he finds the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, “brilliant,” Cox did note that, “He decided to make Logan die, I think ultimately too early.” Cox went on to add, “I mean, he’d made him die in the third episode. And it was a great scene. That’s why I didn’t watch it, because I have no interest in watching. My own death will come soon enough.”
And, like, jeeze, Brian!
Cox comes off, in excerpts from the interview, in that very specific blend of proud and slightly annoyed he usually seems like when talking about Succession, a reminder that there is a reason he was cast as a massively powerful, frequently cranky man of considerable pride and dignity. Among other things, he notes that, “It was an odd feeling” to die in the series with seven episodes to go. “I looked on it, wrongly, as a form of rejection. 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’.”
He does seem to take a certain Logan-ish pride in seeing the internet “go crazy” over his character’s death—and maybe also in the reactions of certain fans who’ve told him they won’t watch the show without him. “They said, ‘No, I’m not going to watch anymore. You’ve gone, I’m not watching’. Which I think is unfortunate and unnecessary because the show is about the succession. So you need to see what’s happening in in the wake of his demise. But, you know, I’m not the writer.”
