You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service.

This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program.

I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is one of the most successful and admired

British actors of his generation, a star of stage and screen who's often portrayed characters

rich in menace. In many ways, Brian Cox's rise to international fame is miraculous. His childhood

in Dundee, Scotland, was marked by poverty

and emotional trauma. His shopkeeper father died when Brian was just eight, leaving the family

heavily in debt. His mother suffered from serious mental illness. Nonetheless, he made his way

into a job at the local theatre and won a scholarship

to drama school. Almost six decades later, and after years of success on stage and in the movies,

Brian Cox is perhaps most internationally celebrated because of his starring role in the HBO hit drama Succession,

in which he plays a ruthless bullying media mogul at the head of a deeply dysfunctional

family. It's a drama which centers on New York, which is where Brian Cox is currently living.

Like all New Yorkers, he's currently living in lockdown

as the state tries to cope with a horrifying number of COVID-19 patients.

Nonetheless, thanks to the wonders of communication technology,

he joins me now from his cabin in Upper New York State. Brian Cox, welcome to

Hard Talk. You have been living in Brooklyn. Now you're in a cabin in New York State. New York State,

of course, is at the epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic in the US. What has life been like for you?

...