Brian Cox says that Clint Eastwood wouldn't have cut it on 'Succession': 'He's a man of few words'

Go ahead... make his day. Succession star Brian Cox channels his inner Clint Eastwood in Catherine Hardwicke's new drama, Prisoner's Daughter, which incorporates elements of Unforgiven and Gran Torino into its story of terminally ill lifer Max, who is released from the Big House to spend his final remaining months with his estranged daughter, Maxine (Kate Beckinsale). Like Eastwood's ex-assassin, William Munny, or his retired soldier, Walt Kowalski, the rough and tumble Max insists that he's finished with violence — but violence inevitably finds him.

"I'm flattered that you thought that," Cox tells Yahoo Entertainment when the comparison is drawn to the now-93-year-old Hollywood icon. "Maybe I should do an action film or a Western. I'd love to do a Western!"

Frankly, it's surprising that Cox and Eastwood's paths haven't crossed before. The British actor has worked with a plethora of American filmmakers since Michael Mann's 1986 favorite, Manhunter, brought him to U.S. shores as the first-ever Hannibal Lecter — everyone from Wes Anderson and David Fincher to Bryan Singer and the Broken Lizard team. And Cox thinks that he would have no trouble adapting to Eastwood's famously no frills filmmaking methods.

"What I love about him is that he doesn't say action — he just says, 'OK, go,'" Cox says, laughing. "So I'd love to work with him — but I don't think I ever will because he's about to do his last film and as far as I know, I'm not in it."

Although Max eventually finds himself in his own Unforgiven situation where he has to revisit his violent roots, Cox does draw a distinction between his alter ego and Eastwood's. "For Max, it's not about violence, it's about sacrifice," he notes. "It's violence towards a purpose. The joy for me in playing this role is that it lets the audience do the work. So much of the movie is understated, and it's about family more than anything else — what family is and what the sins of this father are."

So Cox thinks that he could hack it in a Clint Eastwood movie... but could Clint Eastwood hack it on Succession? "I don't think it's his métier," the late Logan Roy says candidly. "He's a man of few words, and I think he's learned that over the years. Actually, he's a man of specific words shall we say. I don't know if he's watched Succession, but Unforgiven is truly one of the great films, not just because of Clint, but also because of Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman, who is a master.

"The other day my son said to me, 'Dad, have you ever heard of a film called The Conversation?'" Cox continues, segueing from Eastwood to Hackman appreciation mode. "I said, 'Have I heard of a film called The Conversation?! It's one of the truly great films!' So my son said, 'Can we watch it together?' We did and it was it was so good. I was very proud of my son for that."

As it happens, one of Hackman's other stone-cold classics, The French Connection, has been in the news recently. In early June, reports circulated that the version of the William Friedkin-directed film currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and Apple TV+ was censored to remove a racial slur said by Hackman's police detective, Popeye Doyle. The prevailing belief online is that the Walt Disney Company — which owns the film after purchasing the 20th Century Fox library in 2019 — mandated the change, although neither Disney nor Friedkin has commented publicly.

Whoever is responsible for censoring The French Connection, Cox labels the whole situation "nonsense" and connects it to the larger debate over cancel culture. "Don't get me started on cancel culture," he says. "We've got to acknowledge history: People did certain things in certain times and it was wrong. But we can't just cut it out — the thing was done and it's history, so let it be a museum element.

"I don't know where all this comes from," Cox continues. "Who was the first person to say, 'This is bad and we mustn't allow it anymore?' I see it as a form of McCarthyism actually; it's the current version of McCarthyism where people are not allowed to express who they are, what they are and what they do in a way that is historically accurate."

Looking back to the past, Cox cites another Hollywood legend — and Western master — as an example of how people can evolve without censoring themselves. "There were people who changed their own minds, like John Ford," he says, referring to the director of such frontier classics as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. (Ford recently "returned" to the big screen in Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans, where he was played by David Lynch in a well-reviewed cameo.)

While Ford's early films like Stagecoach trafficked in the stereotypes of indigenous Americans that were so prevalent at the time, Cox says that he learned from his own mistakes as an older filmmaker. "He became a great protector of the Navajo Nation in Monument Valley, and had a great respect for them that was almost spiritual. People did certain things in certain times and it was wrong — but just cutting it out doesn't redress it."

Prisoner's Daughter premieres Friday, June 30 in theaters.