Logan Roy is disgusting

The other day I met a young woman wearing a crop top emblazoned with the words Waystar/Royco – the media conglomerate at the heart of Succession, HBO’s cult television drama about the nasty Roy family and their insane attempts at one-upmanship for control of their father’s company. It won Emmy and Golden Globe awards three years running for best drama, plus numerous extra gongs for the cast, making it – in my book – the most overrated piece of entertainment of all time. 

What I disliked most about Succession, which I finally forced myself to watch this year, was the show’s star patriarch Logan Roy, played by gruff ex-RSC man Brian Cox. ‘I hate him so much,’ I told the t-shirt wearing fan. ‘Really? I love him. He’s so gilfy,’ she said, meaning a ‘grandfather I’d like to [fornicate with]’.

There are many memes and Reddit threads about Logan Roy/Cox’s sexiness, which his age, irascibility, sweariness and to my eyes general awfulness seem to only enhance. These are all tied to countless column inches spilled on the programme as a whole, its meaning, its details, its subtexts – even its colours, hues and clothes. ‘How to Look Really, Really, Really Rich: Fashion Lessons From Succession,’ offered Popsugar. ‘How to Dress Like Your Favorite Succession Characters,’ ran a sycophantic Vice piece. ‘While Logan is still technically new money, he has the sensibility of old-money style, and wouldn’t be caught dead with any large insignia on his clothing. He’s sporting $500+ Zegna caps, Ralph Lauren “power cardigans,” and understated Moncler rain jackets.’ 

I often wondered why Brian Cox took on the role as I slogged through yet another uncomfortable sequence of insecure Roy children engaging in cryptic power plays and schoolyard insult matches, all desperate to please their tyrannical, unwell father. Here was a man who played one of the most famous Lears of the last half-century, the best Titus Andronicus of the modern period, and routinely performed cerebral parts in the likes of Tom Stoppard’s Rock and Roll. But rather than the claustrophobic chambers of ancient Rome or the blasted heaths of pre-modern England, Succession offered him a landscape of dull global 21st century luxury, Manhattan townhouses, function rooms and glossy office suites. Instead of Shakespearean passion and depth, wordplay and wit, Cox’s script as Logan Roy mainly consists in bellowing  a petulant ‘fuck off’ to all and sundry. Instead of royal courts or political struggle in communist Czechoslovakia, Cox/Roy’s milieu is American corporate, in all its blandness and aggression. The whole setup is more likely to make the blood clot than sing.

I reminded myself that Cox the man was not Logan Roy, as my loathing for the character built and ossified. But then I saw an interview last week with Sarah Snook, the Australian actress who plays Shiv Roy, Logan’s daughter (she is the only vaguely enjoyable character in the whole tiresome parade). It turns out that Cox and Roy have rather a lot in common: both are completely unhampered by things like decorum, manners, civility, or self-restraint.

‘He has a habit of sometimes going into a false – or could it be real, who knows? – diabetic rage,’ said Snook. ‘The quality of his voice can be very terrifying sometimes. Thunderous.’ Cox’s lack of control on set – his embrace of his role as a ‘thunderous’ old man – has been noted by others. ‘He’s frightening when he gets up into high dudgeon,’ said Peter Friedman, who plays Frank Vernon, a more controlled older man on the HBO show. ‘I don’t mean just acting frightening, I mean actually frightening.’ J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Gerri, Waystar/Royco’s general council, has also said that Cox can be ‘scary’ and ‘terrifying’ to work with. All of which suggests that Logan Roy was well cast, but that a shouty old man is good at playing a shouty old man hardly inspires awe.

There is a wider issue here, however, and that is one of epoch. Shouldn’t men like Logan Roy, and behaviour like Cox’s, be relegated to a distant era, regarded as being as tiresome as it is distasteful? Aren’t we meant to be getting on with a brave new world in which all persons are held to the same standards of comportment? In which an old patriarch like Cox shouting nastily is no more acceptable than a dame like Judy Dench or Helen Mirren doing so (unimaginable) – and in which a primitively macho character like Logan Roy cease to titillate? 

But that Cox/Roy should not only be critically acclaimed for all this, but treated as an unlikely figure of attraction, tells us everything we need to know. Men can still be sex icons, feared and revered, no matter how obnoxious, how rude, how legally dodgy they are. They just have to do it all with enough aggression, rude words, confidence and money. Donald Trump is another example that springs to mind – someone whose masculine style I like about as much as I like Logan Roy’s. 

Oppenheimer, the film about the man who gave us the atom bomb, has just hoovered up a clutch Baftas, further confirming the brisk health of this double standard. It is hard to conclude other than that, despite all the #MeToo frenzy and the lip service paid to feminism by the great and the good, what the world still wants is men doing Important Things Angrily. I look forward to the time when we either want the same of women, or stop finding it interesting or sexy in men. But in an age in which cute young women are sporting Waystar/Royco shirts, it seems our patience with old rich men using the F-word is far from running thin.