Brian Cox may be the only Succession cast member who’s truly ready for the show to end, but he’s still making the most of the final season’s promotional run. Which means, intentionally or not, continuing to rib his onscreen failson/offscreen frenemy Jeremy Strong.
Cox attended the Succession season 4 premiere in London on Thursday wearing an ensemble that was conspicuously brown—Strong’s trademark color in his years of playing Kendall Roy, the prodigal son of Cox’s character Logan on the show. (If it was a reference to Strong, it was more subtle than the dismissive comments Cox has made about Strong’s method-influenced acting style.) Strong’s inclination towards earthy monochromatism—which he characterized to GQ’s Gabriella Paiella in his March cover story as being both “a metaphor for the rest of my life” and “monastic chic”—has fascinated the internet.
Brian Cox at a Succession screening in London on Thursday.
Lia Toby/Getty Images
(Keeping with tradition, Strong wore a rustic, latte-toned tracksuit custom made by the private-label designer Haans Nicholas Mott to the official HBO season 4 premiere in New York City on Monday evening—to which Cox and his wife, Nicole, wore custom Kimia Arya silk outfits dedicated to the ongoing women’s freedom movement in Iran. A gesture that did not, however, prevent Cox from going “full-on Logan Roy” mode on the red carpet and roughhousing with his castmates.)
In any case, Cox’s look at the London premiere was a turbo fit in its own right—and though Logan Roy may stay in Loro Piana, Cox’s actual red carpet wear is more accessible than you might think. As Cox’s stylist Venk Modur tells GQ, his cognac suede utility jacket, cobalt blue turtleneck, and trousers are all from the mass-market menswear brand Paisley & Gray. His great stacked-heel boots are from the Savannah-based label Savas’s store on Melrose, which he previously wore (with an equally great blue-gray leather jacket, also by Savas) while appearing on Jimmy Fallon earlier this week.
“I love endings. I love getting the fuck finished with it,” Cox told Fallon, before he quickly apologized for his salty language: “It’s what I call the Logan Roy disease, and I’ve been affected by it. My wife’s nearly divorcing me because of it.”
Cox’s co-star Jeremy Strong at the Succession season 4 premiere in New York on Monday.
Taylor Hill
Is it a symptom of our own “Logan Roy disease” to assume that Cox was paying tribute to Jeremy Strong by wearing a brown outfit? Maybe. Modur assured me they weren’t channeling Strong with the outfit: “Lol absolutely not,” they said via Instagram DM. “It was a coincidence.” And I’m sure if I’d asked Cox himself this, he would probably reply with Logan Roy’s signature catchphrase: “Fuck off.” Brown is a fashionable color these days, especially in menswear—though Strong probably has at least something to do with that.
Nonetheless, in the lead-up to this Sunday’s high-stakes premiere, it’s more exciting to imagine that Cox is merely grinding Strong’s bones (love of the color brown) to make his bread (this particular red carpet outfit).
