Brian Cox: ‘It horrified me when the three amigos, Clegg, Cameron and Miliband, arrived in Scotland’

Hello, Brian. To play Winston Churchill in the film Churchill, you had to put on a lot of weight. How did you manage it?

I mean, I just didn’t do anything. I indulged myself. It’s difficult not to indulge myself, that’s the problem. It came a lot more easily than I thought. In fact, it was scary.

Did you lose it again? (1)

Oh, yeah, I lost 30lb. I’m like poor Diane Abbott; I have diabetes, too. I recognise her difficulties because my diabetes went crazy as a result [of dieting]. My doctor put me on these vegetarian smoothies to lose the weight.

That doesn’t sound very appetising.

Ah, they are, actually. I’ve stuck with it. It’s a very good system for losing weight. Just to go for a couple of days on the vegetarian smoothies really works quite well. Especially if you feel you’re creeping up again.

Were you not tempted to go with makeup and prosthetics?

No, no, no. I don’t believe in all that. Really, I don’t. I had a little prosthetic – I have a cleft chin, so I filled in my chin, but that was it.

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You took some of the inspiration for your Churchill from an unlikely source.

There’s this thing about how all babies look like Winston Churchill, and Winston Churchill looks like all babies. I thought: that’s an interesting idea, the idea of the child. He had this American mother who was a bit of a fly-by-night – a socialite – and this syphilitic father who was quite bonkers. Then I was watching this programme, Family Guy, with my boys. This character comes on, Stewie Griffin. He has these blue-collar parents, he speaks with a perfect English accent, he lives in his own world, he’s cantankerous, his nature shifts and he becomes quite nasty. And then he becomes very loving, and he has this great relationship with Brian the dog. (2) Of course, he does look like a baby Winston Churchill.

Some commentators have criticised the film for its inaccuracies. (3) Does that matter?

No, I don’t think it matters. Historians are good, they’re necessary, they’re great – but they’re only dealing with facts, they don’t necessarily deal with truths, and they certainly don’t deal withpsychological truths. Clearly, Churchill was troubled. He consumed an enormous amount of alcohol. He was a depressive. The alcohol becomes – no question about it – a form of self-medication. Rightwing historians especially want to keep the myth of Churchill intact, but what I’ve tried to do is show the humanity of the man, and to show he’s a greater man because of that humanity.

Is that why people keep wanting to tell his story? (4)

Yeah. Because we’re still trying to explain it. It’s like dealing with the history plays of Shakespeare. When Shakespeare wrote the plays he could examine events that happened many years before, and put personality to it. That’s what we can do with Churchill. We’re talking 70 years ago now, so we’re able to fill in the gaps.

You spoke about class in Britain as a “caste system” recently. (5)

Most people are too young to remember the 60s, but there was enormous social mobility. I was inspired by the blue-collar, working-class, lower-middle-class actors such as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Tom Courtenay. It was great for a while. Then, in the mid-70s, we started to bring in Brideshead Revisited and all this stuff, like an infatuation. I mean, I’m an Anglophile, so I find I’m caught in the horns of a particular dilemma. A lot of it I admire, but I also think, excuse me saying, it’s fucked us up at the same time. We have become victims of it.

You say you’re an Anglophile, but you switched from being a longtime Labour member to the SNP, and you were in favour of independence. What do you make of the current state of affairs?

We’re in such chaos. I was a member of the Labour party for a long time, but Tony Blair’s hubris finished me off. Jeremy Corbyn is more like Clem Attlee than any other leader of the Labour party because he’s back to those principles of social welfare; of how the country should work, as opposed to how corrupt it’s become. So in a sense, I can understand. It’s not a question of going back in time, it’s a question of time interrupted, because we have never moved forward.Ultimately I’m a federalist. I don’t like the word nationalism, I don’t like it. But they were the ones at that time who were the keepers of social democracy, before Corbyn was even around.

Is he enough to tempt you back to Labour?

I would like to see the Labour party and the SNP in [power], sorting it out. I do think we can come to some sort of much more federal arrangement where we actually take care of ourselves, like a united states of Great Britain. It horrified me when the three amigos, as I describe them – Clegg, Cameron and Miliband – arrived in Scotland and it was like they didn’t know who the people were. It was like we were these haggis-eaters who run around on the mountains, you know? I just thought: this is ridiculous. This is the 21st century. Why are you talking in this patronising way?

How often are you mistaken for pop-star-turned-physicist Brian Cox? (6)

Too many times. It’s a little bit the bane of my life, really. Especially since he wanted to trademark his name, which I was not very happy about.

Did you have to formally object?

I quietly objected. I think he may have trademarked himself as “professor Brian Cox”. He seems a nice enough man. I don’t know him personally.

Churchill is in cinemas nationwide today

Footnotes

1) Brian is talking on the phone so it’s hard to see if he has or not.

2) Brian was killed off in 2014 but his death proved so unpopular that Stewie travelled back in time to save him two episodes later.

3) Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts said it was “a hatchet job of the kind the Nazi propaganda machine would have been proud” which is a bit strong.

4) John Lithgow played Churchill in The Crown last year; Gary Oldman will play him in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour later this year.

5) Cox grew up in a working-class family in Dundee and says it would be “almost impossible for somebody like me” to get into acting now.

6) You have to type “Brian Cox actor” into Google if you don’t wish to first discover the wonders of the universe.