Brian Cox has done all right by Conor McPherson. The feeling is no doubt mutual. When Cox, the 53-year-old Scottish actor, took on McPherson's one-man play, St Nicholas, portraying a jaded Dublin theatre critic (can there be such a thing?) with an unhealthy obsession for a young actress, he also acquired something which no modern actor is without: a made-to-measure performance, ready-to-wear whenever needs must. Since its 1997 debut at London's Bush Theatre, Cox has dusted St Nicholas down for runs in New York, Los Angeles and his native Dundee. It's a case of "have show will travel".
"I had a three week gap in filming recently," explains Cox, whose career highlights have included playing the original Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter, the British police officer Kerrigan in Ken Loach's IRA drama, Hidden Agenda, and the IRA godfather Joe Hamill in Jim Sheridan's The Boxer. "There's a small, 300-seat theatre in Los Angeles called the Matrix and they were about to open a production that wasn't ready and the director wouldn't let it go on. He'd already spent $40,000, so I said I'd come and do a benefit for him. It's the advantage of a one-man show - you can just do it. We did St Nicholas for a week and it was so successful we did three extra performances. We made about $35,000, so they were able to go ahead with their next production." Now Cox is cementing his relationship with the 27-year-old McPherson, best known for his West End and Broadway hit The Weir and his award-winning 1997 screenplay I Went Down, as he stars alongside Bronagh Gallagher and Andrew Scott in a new three-hander called Dublin Carol. In it, Cox plays an undertaker estranged from his family, handing out advice to his assistant (Scott) and coming to terms with the arrival of his 30-year-old daughter (Gallagher).
"It's a beautiful play," says Cox, who'll be performing in London's newly refurbished Royal Court after a run at the Old Vic. "Again, it's got his quirky style of writing." Whenever you meet Cox, he's always doing the work of three people. When he took the lead role in King Lear at London's National Theatre in 1991, it wasn't enough to be playing one of the most demanding parts in the English language for one of the world's most prestigious theatres on a year-long international tour. Nor was it enough to act in Richard III for the same company on his nights off: Cox wrote a book about it at the same time. When he starred in the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum touring production of The Master Builder in 1994, you could also see him on British TV in The Negotiator, pore over his photo spread in Hello! magazine, and find him lending support to an international student acting initiative. He told me at the time that he'd also volunteered to give interviews to mental health patients as part of their work therapy. He wasn't boasting. He just can't say no.
True to form, Cox has several projects on the go today. He's been in Canada recording the part of Hermann Goering for a forthcoming US TV series about the Nuremberg Trials ("the best role I've had in a long time on celluloid"); and there are at least six films recently or imminently to be released, among them a costume drama, a Scottish football movie, and at least one violent Hollywood action thriller. How he does it all is a mystery. Why he does it can be explained by an instinctive restlessness, a permanent quest for the next artistic kick, a continual rejection of routine. The rejection means that if you talk to him for 10 minutes, the conversation inevitably swings round to his disenchantment with Britain. He thinks British culture has severe problems, that British theatre has lost its pioneering zest, that British writers aren't up to scratch, and so on and so on.
His opinions are as genuine as they are passionate, though it's easy to suspect they are partly a form of self-justification. It helps him explain why he has spent four years living in the USA, earning his crust from commercial Hollywood, where once he was a stalwart of subsidised British theatre. Then again, he has never minded speaking his mind. He slammed the monolithic inflexibility of the Royal Shakespeare Company and London's National Theatre, even as he was working for those grand institutions. Now he scorns the predictability of the theatrical repertory system, and rails against the philistine bureaucracy of the BBC. His flirtation with Hollywood is merely his way of breaking the mould, up-turning his own expectations, and the expectations of those who would like to see him typecast in one way or another. The cash comes in handy too. Indeed, his career path has long been a mixture of financial expediency and artistic opportunism. Movie money lets him do McPherson. His recent years in Hollywood - acting opposite Geena Davis, Keanu Reeves, Steven Seagal, Michael Keaton, Andy Garcia and Kevin Costner, flying the Scottish flag in Braveheart and Rob Roy, and even directing his own unsung feature debut, Scorpion Spring, with Alfred Molina and Ruben Blades - is a calculated way of raising his profile and bolstering his bank balance, giving him the freedom to pursue more demanding work.
"I did these movies deliberately because I wanted to change the mind-set that I'd got into," he told me in 1996. "The advantage of America is you do get paid extremely well for what you do. The disadvantage is what you do isn't the best imaginable work." No surprise, then, that he thinks it's good to get back to the theatre. "It's not good, it's vital," says Cox, whose light-footed, balletic presence on stage belies his stocky build. "I realised that when I went to America in 1995 and I didn't do any stage stuff for nearly two years. Conor's play came along and I had to do that. It wasn't at any of the big institutions, and it was great. Then I did Skylight [by David Hare] in Los Angeles, which I loved, and I thought I've really got to balance it out." A life-long socialist still committed enough to lend his voice to Tony Blair's election campaign in 1997, Cox, for all his fighting talk, is one big softie. He might play Hollywood hard guys, but at his best he's an emotional performer, his passion and vulnerability matched only by his intelligence. Off-stage, nothing touches him like his native Dundee.
"I have a very big soft spot for my home town," he says. " They call it the City of Discovery, but they should call it the City of Survival. It's about a group of people who've been written off more times than I know, and they still go on." After Dundee, his fondness extends to the Irish capital. "I spend a lot of time in Dublin now," he says. "My daughter was at university at Trinity, and I've done three movies in Ireland, so I've spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards to Dublin.
"I love it there. It's the one place that the English language is alive and well! The Irish writers are amazing. They don't get caught up in the way that English writers do. They have a universal quality about them and a wonderful sense of archetypes, and yet it's particular. I don't know what's happened to British writing; it gets caught in its own fashionable enterprise."
Dublin Carol opens at the Old Vic Theatre, London, on Saturday, January 15th and transfers to the Royal Court Downstairs from February 17th to March 18th
