What it’s really like to make an advert with Succession star Brian Cox
His on-screen character Logan Roy would have no patience for the ad-making process. Creative agency House337’s spills on what it was like working with the actor on Santander’s latest ad which drew inspiration from the hit series.
The agency’s initial brief from Santander was to execute a campaign for its corporate division that would help it stand out. People are used to seeing banking ads with loads of people shaking hands, it's all about business done in a certain way. This couldn’t be that.
The agency’s executive creative director Jo Moore also said it needed a departure from its tried-and-tested brand spokespeople.
“We do a hell of a lot of work for Santander,” she explains. “For consumer-facing campaigns, we use Ant and Dec. It works brilliantly.” For the corporate side of the operation, the Geordie duo wasn’t quite right. To really cut through on TV and speak to business clients, it could only be one man and that man was Logan Roy, well, Brian Cox.
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The Scottish Succession actor wasn’t initially included in the campaign’s budget, which was tight. But as the brief began to develop, there really was no other person who would be right for the part. From that day, Santander loved the idea that it could be Cox. Everyone saw sense, as she puts it. “He’s great. As you can imagine, he’s quite a tricky character in real life but lovely too,” Moore says. “We wanted this spot to be the absolute best.”
Everyone says that in business, it’s who you know, but the bank wanted to flip that narrative, she explains. It became all about the people you don’t know, that kind of ‘sliding doors’ moments that have a lasting effect. You might not know who you are sitting next to at dinner and Brian played the role of observer and spokesperson perfectly, Moore adds.
Crucially, the director had to be the perfect fit and he had to work well with Cox. “That’s what led us to Tom Hooper,” she says. Hooper’s past work includes The King’s Speech, Cats and a slew of commercial ads.
“[Hooper] really helped with getting Brian on board, using someone of that caliber who respects actors, gets the most out of them and understands them.” She said the director is a brilliant storyteller, which gave Cox confidence in the project. He was even the one to suggest that the Shakespearean actor be the voiceover in some of the scenes. There was a coolness to it all, she says.
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Of course, when dealing with such a seasoned actor there might be a few hurdles. “There were one or two times where he slightly lost it on the script and then sorted himself out again,” says Moore. “But he’s the star from Succession, we expected that from him and he was a lovely gentleman.”
If you’ve seen that ad, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was filmed in New York, but it was actually shot in Warsaw, Poland. “We didn’t have the budget to go to the States,” admits Moore. And the pool scene? That was two different locations merged into one.
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The timing of the release was fortuitous, the same week the Succession finale finally aired. From brief to finished product, the process took just over three months. The client wanted it out before Summer, so they had to work quickly. “The TV producer who brought everyone together has gone for a lie down in Barbados,” jokes Moore. “It’s amusing but well deserved.”
On the ‘Brian 2.0,’ as Moore puts it, watch this space.
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