“However, as usual, we digress.” – Brian Cox

Suppose your friend is describing a party where Barack Obama surprisingly shows up. Would you prefer them to gloss over that detail, “sticking to the point” of the party and why they were originally there – or would you say: “Cut the bullshit, what was he like?” Consider this point in the context of an autobiography where the author has spent a life working with dozens of household names. How often would you begrudge the author for getting easily distracted?

That is the overall style of Brian Cox’s autobiography, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat. It is often chaotic, covering a dozen topics in fewer pages, but rarely uninteresting. The title comes from a statement Cox overheard from Oliver Cotton who, when their frustrated director was begging to pull some magic out of their ailing play, stated: “You’ve got to get the rabbit into the hat in the first place.” Across 51 chapters Brian Cox candidly discusses his own life’s story, provides insight into the world of acting and entertains the reader with gossip about performers he has shared a stage with – including a live panther.

The man himself was born to a working-class family on June 1^st, 1946 in the city of Dundee, Scotland. From a young age he saw himself as “…an infant determinist. Later on in life I’d have a mentor who told me, ‘It’ll be the long haul for you, Brian,’ a condition I accepted, unconditionally. And I see now how Dundee’s whaling history acts as a metaphor for that state of being. The long haul meant keeping astride the lost whale through sea and estuary, wave after wave after wave.” His father would pass from pancreatic cancer when Cox was only eight, a tragedy that incited severe mental illness in his mother and led to an especially difficult childhood. From there he details the beginnings of his acting career in Dundee, progressing in age and career throughout theaters across the United Kingdom and his eventual journey to Hollywood.

The book opens with a chapter largely devoted to mocking Steven Segal from the time Cox worked with him on the movie The Glimmer Man. The overall tone, then, is immediately set – Cox does not fawn or play nice for the sake of appearances. He is frequently critical about his coworkers and writes freely about their nature behind the scenes and their respective approaches to acting, including Kevin Spacey, Keanu Reeves, Samuel Jackson, Ian McKellen, Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Dustin Hoffman – and many others.  

If mere gossip isn’t your thing, Cox is perhaps most interesting when discussing his profession: “…the thing about my job is that you never stop learning. You never stop learning how to take a moment, how to circumvent it, how to knock it forward, how to not dwell, how to understand the verb but keep it moving and not get trapped into it.” He is open about his own growth – such as how two contrary pieces of advice helped him improve at different points in his career – “Don’t just do something, stand there” and “Don’t just stand there, do something,” – his lesson being not to adopt one mindset wholeheartedly in all circumstances. He is additionally critical of his own ego and the neuroses common in his peers, writing: “After all, we actors are whores for praise, locked into approbation, capable of killing our offspring in return for validation and living only for applause, both literally and figuratively.”

Writing is also a frequent topic. Cox identifies the most significant and common reason for a film’s failure as the script. After arguing this point on his own, he provides a collection of quotes: “One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous quotes is, “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script, and the script.’ But there are a million others I could choose from. George Cukor: ‘Give me a good script and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director.’ Steven Soderbergh: ‘The key is – don’t monkey around with the script. Then everything usually goes pretty well.’ Howard Hawks: ‘You can’t fix a bad script after you start shooting.’ Richard Attenborough: ‘There is nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.’”

It is mostly endearing – but not always. The book is often written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness. Its chapters are not titled – not a fault in-and-of itself, but I mention it to communicate that any endeavor of highlighting the subject of a chapter in a few words would be hopeless. Cox’s relevant age and the decade being discussed can frequently change multiple times in a chapter and not always with clear transitions and, when certain chapters lack smooth transitions, it is disorienting to determine if we’re back to the main timeline of his life or not.

Still, the stylistic choices are rarely aggravating. In one nine-page chapter, Cox is asked to come to the Paramount lot in LA, and he begins discussing his initial attempts to locate the director he was to meet, who is currently editing Marathon Man. Cox then briefly discusses Marathon Man, which brings him to Dustin Hoffman’s method acting style, then Daniel Day Lewis’s, then the history of acting styles through the icons of Stanislavski and Adler, until we’re back hearing about Cox’s first Paramount experience. While it sounds chaotic enough, the author largely achieves an authentic, organic style; yes, the subjects will frequently change, but Cox cannot help but think of points more interesting than what was being addressed a moment before and that could not fit neatly into a more organized work.

Life itself is seldom strictly linear – and we should not begrudge the author too much for not feigning a constant clear structure in his own life’s story. The man is interesting enough to make you forget that you are reading a celebrity actor’s autobiography. Yes, while much of it is merely gossip for people who consider themselves above TMZ and Twitter, it is worth a read for his insightful commentary on all things theater and film. If not for that, then, it is still enjoyable for his sense of humor: “‘I need to understand this,’ he [the director] would fret, ‘I really need to understand this.’ Yes, we thought to ourselves. Understanding Julius Caesar would indeed be an advantage when it comes to directing it.”