Brian Cox and Brad Pitt in Troy. (Photo: Warner Bros) It appears not even Logan Roy able to resist Brad Pitt’s charms. Scottish acting legend Brian Cox, who can currently be seen in HBO’s series Succession as the Roy family patriarch, has revealed that he was transfixed by Pitt’s beauty when they were working together on Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 historical war epic Troy.
The movie was based on the Trojan War between Troy and the Greeks and took material from Homer’s Iliad and Quintus Smyrnaeus’s Posthomerica. Cox played the role of king of Greeks Agamemnon, while Pitt essayed Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors.
In the film, Agamemnon, using the pretext of insult given to his brother Menelaus by the Trojan prince Paris (Menelaus’ wife Helen had eloped with Paris), invades the city-state of Troy with the largest Greek army ever assembled at his back. Achilles, hungry for glory, tags along despite his dislike for Agamemnon.
Apart from Cox and Pitt, the film was otherwise too stacked with big names like Peter O’Toole, Sean Bean, Brendan Gleeson, Rose Byrne, Eric Bana, Diane Kruger, and Orlando Bloom.
Cox spoke about Pitt and the movie while doing a video retrospective about his career for Vanity Fair. He said, “I remember at one point,” he said, “just kind of being agog at Brad ’cause, you know, he’d never been in costumes like that. We had all experienced these great costume epics because we’d spent most of our time like that, if we’d done the classical theater; we were always without pants! Brad walked on and my jaw was down because he was so stunningly beautiful.”
He added, “I mean, I’m straight, but I just thought, ‘Wow! My God, this guy is stunning!’ What chance does one have sharing the screen with this beautiful, beautiful man?”
While Troy was a huge commercial success (almost $500 million on a less than $190 million budget), the film did not impress critics, and holds only a 54 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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