Brian Cox, who stars as Logan Roy in the HBO series Succession, has said he has “enormous sympathy” for Meghan Markle and Prince Harry who are the “victims” of “a fairy tale that went horribly wrong.”
Cox, speaking to the U.K. magazine Radio Times for the launch of the show’s fourth and final series said that previous comments he made about Meghan in a Haute Living magazine profile were taken out of context.
In that interview he said Meghan “knew what she was getting into” when she married into the royal family, according to The Times of London.
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He was widely quoted as saying: “She knew what she was getting into, and there’s an ambition there clearly as well—the childhood dreams of marrying Prince Charming and all that shit we see as fantasy that could be our lives in our dreams.”
He now repudiates those comments.
“I’m a bit angry about that,” he said in the new interview with Radio Times, “Because that whole thing has been taken out of context. I actually have enormous sympathy for them.
“They’re the product of an institution which is moribund and shouldn’t exist any more.
“But that’s a difficult situation where [Meghan] comes from, and it’s understandable that she sees something [appealing] – and it does look like a fairy tale. But it was a fairy tale that went horribly wrong.”
Cox said that he is a republican and opposed to the system of monarchy which, he said, “fundamentally, in this day and age, doesn’t make any sense.”
He said that he accepted a royal honor called a CBE in 2002 to please his late sister Bette, a committed royalist.
“If it wasn’t for my sister, I wouldn’t be here… She was my constant in my life. And she was a great royalist. So the reason I accepted the first time around was [because] it honored her as much as anything else. Because she was a believer.”
Speaking about the royal couple in December, he told Good Morning Britain: “I don’t know what went on, but something clearly traumatic went on for the pair of them. I don’t think they made it up, I don’t think it’s false. I think it’s true and should’ve been rectified, and it hasn’t.”
Cox also reiterated comments that Jesse Armstrong, the British creator of the show, was right to make the new series the last one. “He knows how to tell his tale, how to shape his tale, and that’s what he does. And you’ve got to hand it to him. I’m absolutely fine with that. I can’t knock it, the show’s given me so much.”
