The Washington Post’s Sunday Style section was headlined by a story that gushed over Succession star Brian Cox — who’s recently been the voice behind McDonald’s commercials — lashing out at “deeply stupid” people in America and Israel engaged in “dangerous” and “gross stupidity” similar to the Holocaust, making for a “pretty horrible time that we’re living in.”
Cox was profiled for his role as composer Sebastian Bach in the Shakespeare Theatre Company production of The Score, based on Bach’s “1747 visit to the court of Frederick II, when the Prussian king challenged the aging maestro to improvise a byzantine musical fugue.” The tag line was the perfect lead-in to the left’s miserable worldview anytime their team isn’t in power: “How does art survive when despots rule?”
Published online Thursday, Post reporter Thomas Floyd said the play isn’t so much interested in Bach’s legendary music as it is “in thorny conversations about artists’ roles in political conversations, the plight of military occupation and how creativity can unlock even the cruelest of minds.”
Floyd wrote that, even though Cox had played Bach back in England in both 2023 and 2025, the “modern parallels” made another run something he “couldn’t resist.”
“Even events that unfolded after ‘The Score’ began performances earlier this month — the dismissal of Macklemore from Ed Sheeran’s tour for making pro-Palestinian comments, or President Donald Trump’s threats to demolish the Kennedy Center — have underscored its resonance,” Floyd said.
Cox then let loose about how “the world” has “go[ne] to hell in a nustshell” because humans are “so deeply stupid”:
“As you see the world go to hell in a nutshell, you begin to realize that human beings are so deeply stupid about many things,” Cox says. “They’re inspired. They can be incredible. But they can also be deeply stupid. And we live in a time of gross stupidity — but dangerous stupidity. What’s happening in Gaza, what’s happening in Ukraine, what’s happening in the world at the moment — it’s just pretty horrific. We’ve allowed it to take us over, and we haven’t stood up in a way.”
Floyd added, “Cox’s Bach calmly confronts Frederick about the horrors unleashed by the monarch’s warmongering ways. And Cox can feel D.C. theatergoers relishing all of the above.”
Cox explained audiences back in the U.K. “never responded to the play the way these people have” in the U.S., which he said was “extremely gratifying,” even though it’s because they’re “desperate for some kind of valuation of their lives and who they are in this pretty horrible time that we’re living in.”
Much of the article is about the 80-year-old’s lifetime in film and on the stage, but the piece later circled back to allusions to Trump and Jews. As with earlier in the piece, Floyd started vague:
Nowadays, Cox connects deeply to Bach, or at least the world-weary version of the man in “The Score.” Disillusioned by Frederick’s military aggression and the appalling acts committed by his troops, Bach can’t resist voicing his objections when face-to-face with the charismatic tyrant. And it’s not hard to imagine Cox — ever outspoken about the injustices he sees in the world — doing the same in that scenario.
This cued up Cox’s blatant attack on Jews, comparing the Holocaust to Israel’s war in Gaza, making no mention of October 7:
Take his views on Israel’s war in Gaza, for example. “You can’t believe that these people who went through the most horrific situation in the ’30s could almost behave in slightly the same way,” he says. “I find that truly shocking. I’m 80 now, and I look around and I say, ‘Are we actually learning anything? Why doesn’t it transform us? Why do we go down a path?’ And basically, it’s stupidity, it’s narcissism, and it’s all kinds of stuff that has put us in this dilemma.
He expanded it out to a slight at Trump only the dishonest or perpetually clueless couldn’t catch: “Also, we have to be careful in the future about who we vote for, and what we want the world to be. But, of course, it serves the play brilliantly.”
