Brian Cox Braveheart (1995)
Brian Cox was forty-eight when he shot Braveheart and was, in 1994, one of the busiest character actors in British film and stage. He had been the original Hannibal Lecktor in Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986), had done seven productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and had won the Olivier Award for Titus Andronicus in 1988. The role of Argyle Wallace — William's uncle and guardian,b7 on screen for under four minutes total — was the film's bridge from the boy's funeral to the adult Wallace's village wedding.b6 b9
Born in Dundee, RSC by his thirties
Cox was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1946, the youngest of five children. His father died when he was eight; his mother had a series of breakdowns. He left school at fourteen and entered the Dundee Repertory Theatre as an assistant stage manager. He trained at LAMDA from 1963 to 1965 and worked his way through the British regional theater system to the Royal Shakespeare Company by his early thirties.
"I came to acting because I had nothing else. I left school with no qualifications. The Dundee Rep took me in. Without that theatre I would not have had a life." — Brian Cox, The Guardian (2021, archived)
By 1994 he had played Lear, Titus, and Petruchio for the RSC; been the first onscreen Hannibal Lecktor in Manhunter; and worked steadily across British television. He came to Braveheart with a small part already shot in Rob Roy (1995) — the two films overlapped in production and competed at the box office that summer (see The Highlander Rob Roy and Last of the Mohicans Window).
Argyle in three scenes
Cox is on screen for the funeral, the cottage night with the dream-vision of Malcolm, and the swordsmanship-and-Latin montage.b6 b7 The whole performance is approximately the length of a single act of King Lear. The character lays the structural seed for Wallace's two later refusals — the refusal of compromise to the Scottish nobles, and the refusal of laudanum in the Tower cellb27 b38 — by promising to teach William first the head and then the sword.b7
"Brian Cox in Braveheart is on screen for three minutes and you remember the character for three hours. That is what character acting at the highest level looks like." — Mark Lawson, The Guardian (2017, archived)
Cox has said in subsequent interviews that he took the part because he liked Gibson and because the character had a clean structural job — Argyle hands William an inheritance and exits — that did not require him to sustain a Highland accent across a three-hour film. (His Lecktor was American; his Logan Roy in Succession would be Scottish-Canadian-American hybrid; the Braveheart accent was straight Dundee.)
After Braveheart
Cox's post-1995 career is a list of supporting parts in big American films and lead roles in smaller films and television: Rushmore (1998), The Bourne Identity (2002) and The Bourne Supremacy (2004), Match Point (2005), Adaptation (2002), 25th Hour (2002), Troy (2004), and the role he is now most identified with, Logan Roy in HBO's Succession (2018–2023). The Logan Roy performance won him the Golden Globe in 2020 and remade his profile for an audience that knew him primarily as a character man.
"I have been working steadily for fifty-seven years and the part everyone wants to talk to me about is one I shot when I was seventy-two. I do not mind. It is a good part." — Brian Cox, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (2021, memoir, not available online)