It’s hardly one of Shakespeare’s lighter efforts, but Brian Cox seems almost to twinkle in Coriolanus, as if he’s dancing through the film. Such a lively reading of his character, the politician Menenius—“He’s a bit of an old fart, like Polonius,” in Cox’s words, if not in his hands—reminds us that the indefatigable Scottish actor was one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s major stars long before he busied himself with a movie career that lately included Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Of course, as Albert Finney will tell you, the path from lion of British theatre to superior Hollywood character actor isn’t entirely unusual.

“You know, I did all the classical theatre until I was in my early forties,” Cox tells the Georgia Straight from his Manhattan home, “and the thing about it was, I was born in Scotland, and my culture was always the American cinema. It was never the British cinema. I never responded to those kinds of British films where everyone talked, like, ‘Frightfully, frightfully.’ ” When Cox took on the role of Hannibal Lecktor (original spelling) in Michael Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter (beating Anthony Hopkins to the punch), he had the opportunity he’d been waiting for. “So I made the decision to come and have a film career here,” he says. “But as I’m getting older, I wanna go home more, and by home, I mean Scotland.”

Not to belabour the point, but Coriolanus is another form of homecoming, and one of the great pleasures of Ralph Fiennes’s debut as director (he also plays the lead) is watching Cox and Vanessa Redgrave exercising their classical-theatre chops. He partly agrees. “I mean, Vanessa,” Cox begins. “I’m appalled at how Vanessa has been ignored by both the Academy and the British academy. We should be ashamed. I do think Vanessa’s performance is a major theatrical Shakespearean performance, and to have that performance on film is a unique document of a great actress doing her work.”

Cox also has high praise for director Fiennes, another RSC alumni. Although his own preferences for film versions of Hamlet and King Lear are those by Russian filmmaker Grigori Kozintsev (and he considers Kenneth Branagh’s efforts “a little picture booky”), Cox thinks that Fiennes’s decision to transpose Coriolanus from Rome to a queasily familiar, Balkanlike state (it was shot in Serbia), complete with graphic modern warfare, was “quite brilliant”.

“I’m in the film, so I’m biased, but I think it’s one of the finest Shakespeare adaptations there’s been in many a long year,” he says. “I thought, ‘How are we going to capture that sort of bloody parliamentarian style?’ And, of course, the Serbs were doing it since the death of Tito. They’ve been doing it rather successfully—successfully in quotes—I mean, kind of bloodily. They’ve always got rid of their kings by throwing them off balconies or assassinating them, for one thing, and their history is full of assassination, so I thought that Belgrade was a brilliant kind of parallel to Rome.”

Georgia Straight, January 2012