“Succession” star Brian Cox is the latest celebrity to weigh in on celebrity cancel culture, which he analogized to a modern-day form of “McCarthyism.” The 75-year-old Laurence Olivier award winner dropped the bombshell during a Thursday appearance on Piers Morgan’s show “Uncensored” on TalkTV.
“It is a kind of modern-day McCarthyism really,” Cox told the host of the so-called witch hunt, in which celebs are excommunicated from Hollywood for certain actions and opinions. “It is a kind of raid on people’s sensibilities in order to reduce them and make them… I don’t know, there is so much hypocrisy in the whole thing.”
The thespian continued, “I am not religious but there is a thing in the bible where it says, ‘Let he or she without sin cast the first stone’ and there seems to be a lot of casting of stones. And it is like a virus.”
Cox was in good company while discussing the negativity of cancel culture with Post columnist Piers Morgan, who recently vowed to wipe out the damning trend.
“My mission statement for this show is simple: I’m canceling cancel culture,” Morgan told “Piers Morgan Uncensored” viewers in April. “I’ll defeat this insidious, joyless, societal scourge with those most effective of democracy-preserving weapons: Common sense and truth. And that’s ‘the’ truth. Not ‘your’ truth.”
“It is a kind of raid on people’s sensibilities in order to reduce them and make them… I don’t know, there is so much hypocrisy in the whole thing,” said Cox.Ash Knotek/Piers Morgan UncensorHe added: “This is a no-cancel zone. No opinion will be silenced. No debate will be off-limits. No BS will be tolerated.”
Elsewhere in Thursday’s interview, Cox defended author JK Rowling, who’s received a tsunami of backlash from both the trans community and “Harry Potter” movie stars alike over her perceived transphobic comments.
“I thought there was something deeply unjust about it. And I just felt that,” declared the Scottish dramatist. “It is happening time and time again.”
“It is not only the people who are canceled. It is also people like their families, like their children, like their parents,” he added, analogizing cancel culture’s consequences to “an earthquake situation.”
“I am not religious but there is a thing in the bible where it says, ‘Let he or she without sin cast the first stone’ and there seems to be a lot of casting of stones,” Cox commented. “And it is like a virus.”Ash Knotek/Piers Morgan UncensorCox also referenced the suspension of the Aziz Ansari film “Being Mortal” over Bill Murray’s alleged “inappropriate behavior” on set. The 71-year-old “Saturday Night Live” legend recently chalked up the incident to a “difference of opinion with a woman I’m working with.”
“In my business, it catches because suddenly projects (are affected),” the multi-time Emmy Winner lamented. “Bill Murray the other day, he made a remark and was taken in a way of being offensive. The picture he was making was stopped, the whole thing.”
He added, “Bill went on, I think it was CNN, and explained himself, I thought rather brilliantly, saying, ‘It’s about times that have changed, I grew up in one time and I am meeting another time and it is very hard to know how to approach that time.”
From left to right: Cherry Jones, Brian Cox and Holly Hunter in “Succession.”Cox deemed the celebrity scarlet lettering particularly damaging as it inhibits people’s ability to “make a conversation” or even “joke with one another.”
Morgan referenced comments by Twitter boss Elon Musk that accused modern Hollywood of being infected with a “woke mind virus.”
Cox responded, “It is total fascism. You are absolutely right. It is total fascism…You see, it is hypocrisy again.”
“The hypocritical notion of ‘I am being liberal’ but actually you are being fascist and people should just stop it and behave themselves,” he said.
JK Rowling attends the “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” world premiere at The Royal Festival Hall on March 29, 2022 in London, England. Getty Images for Warner Bros. Indeed cancel culture has been a point of contention in Tinseltown with some advocates dubbing it a democratic form of predator-deterrent. Meanwhile, critics claim that it serves to punish anyone who doesn’t walk in lockstep with the “woke” Hollywood orthodoxy.
In a November interview with the Hollywood Reporter, actress Dakota Johnson bemoaned the phenomenon, saying she believes a “major overcorrection is happening” and that “people can change.”
