'Succession' star Brian Cox says he thinks Logan died 'too early'

Brian Cox's Succession character Logan Roy was never one to hide his feelings. And although he words it much more politely than Logan likely would have, Cox clearly doesn't mind putting his point of view across when it comes to the show's final season.

Sitting down with the BBC's Amol Rajan in the run-up to the finale being aired, Cox said he thought his character was killed off too early after being asked if he'd had any input with creator Jesse Armstrong on when Logan would go.

"There's no point going down that road, especially with somebody like Jesse, because he's already made a plan, and in a way he probably got slightly hoisted by his own petard on that one, because he had to then keep that thing going," says Cox in the interview. "And the scripts, I gather, after I left, got later and later and later, because I think it was a big challenge. But he decided to make Logan die — I think, ultimately, too early. I mean he made him die in the third episode. I think maybe he could have died, I would have thought, the fifth or sixth episode. I would have thought that would have been appropriate."

Cox goes on to say that he "wrongly" looked on it as a form of rejection at the time, although he acknowledges that the way they got rid of him was "pretty brilliant".

"I mean that was so brilliant the way he did it because there was no set up, we didn't know what was going to happen, he gets on the plane, he seems hale and hearty, he's just had these huge first two acts – episode one, episode two we see this in full blast – and then suddenly he's gone. And I was fine with it, ultimately, but I did feel a little bit rejected."

He does have one conspiracy theory to share, though, after Rajan makes a comment about how we don't actually see Logan die on screen.

"I was also saying – and I still believe this – maybe Logan isn't dead," Cox says. "This could be part of an elaborate ruse to find out...well, if you think about it from Logan's point of view, he has to find out how are his children going to behave when he dies. What will then happen? And the only way to do that is to fake his death."

It seems pretty unlikely given how many people were on the plane with Logan, and how many people would need to be keeping the secret, but it certainly would quite the twist.

The series finale of Succession airs May 28 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.