{"id":480606,"date":"2026-06-16T19:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/480606\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T19:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T19:31:08","slug":"jesse-armstrong-praises-brian-cox-peter-capaldis-good-f-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/480606\/","title":{"rendered":"Jesse Armstrong Praises Brian Cox, Peter Capaldi\u2019s \u201cGood F*** Off\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSuccession<\/a> creator Jesse Armstrong<\/a> came to Banff World Media Festival on Tuesday to praise U.K. actors Peter Capaldi and Brian Cox<\/a> for their foul mouths.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBoth of them deliver a very good fuck off,\u201d Armstrong said of Capaldi, who starred in one of his series, Thick of It, and Cox who became renowned for flipping the bird in his patrician role in Succession. \u201cThere\u2019s some things which British idiom is good on, and \u2018fuck off\u2019 sounds better, I think, in British and Scottish dialect than it does in U.S. and Canadian accents,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring a keynote address in the Canadian Rockies, Armstrong also revealed a habit of sitting with pen-in-hand when watching TV or reading books. \u201cWhen I\u2019m reading a novel, I read with a pen in my hand, and I guess that\u2019s the way I watch TV and how I grew up watching TV and reading novels,\u201d Armstrong said. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTo do corrections,\u201d Armstrong, the son of an English teacher, revealed. He broke out in his native U.K. by co-creating the\u00a0British comedy show Peep Show\u00a0with his longtime writing partner Sam Bain, before they collaborated on Fresh Meat.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s what got me writing, as I read a screenplay with my pen in my hand, making corrections, and he (Bain) didn\u2019t take offense. He liked them and that\u2019s what encouraged us to write together,\u201d Armstrong recalled. The duo also adapted The 70s Show for British TV, which failed with their audience, but became a big learning experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe power of the pen also served the multiple Emmy winner well as he made his directorial debut with the Steve Carell-starring HBO movie\u00a0Mountainhead, a drama about billionaire friends and tech barons during a rolling international financial crisis.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s not fun not having any friends,\u201d Armstrong said of real life tech barons like Elon Musk<\/a> and Mark Zuckerberg. \u201cThe quality of their personal relationships feels thin, feels unsustaining. I feel sorry for that, but that\u2019s not unconnected to how they move in the world,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n

\n\tOn Succession, Armstrong said writing about power, as opposed to the world of the super wealthy, was more at work as he penned his scripts. \u201cI think I can write about this area. I think I have some things to say,\u201d he added, without being able to specifically answer why people in power matter in his writing.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhy are these people like they are? Why is the world like it is? I guess that\u2019s the fundamental itch that I\u2019m trying to scratch, the questions I\u2019m trying to answer for myself,\u201d Armstrong explained. For Succession, he reiterated the popular HBO series was not about the Murdochs.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt sometimes feels like I\u2019m trying to evade some essential truth when I say that, but it really isn\u2019t,\u201d Armstrong said as his research that preceded writing the Succession scripts included studies of a host of other powerful people in U.S. and U.K. media, including Disney\u2019s Michael Eisner, Conrad Black and the late Robert Maxwell in the U.K. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tArmstrong said it wasn\u2019t a coincidence began and ended in many ways around the character of Greg \u201cCousin Greg\u201d Hirsch as he was new to the Roy family\u2019s world of wealth and privilege, as was the long running drama\u2019s loyal audience.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI always felt the bubble that you get in a Dallas or The West Wing, it\u2019s often nice to have a character the audience can follow, who knows as little as the audience about the social conventions and the details of that world, because they can be told information that the audience wants to know,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n

\n\tArmstrong also cautioned against writing TV series about the rich and powerful to effect change in the world. Documentaries and newspaper op-eds, he explained, are far better vehicles for that.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s not a sword, it\u2019s not even a medical drug that can cure something. It\u2019s like a recreational drug that might alter the way someone thinks, but they\u2019re not going to see on their mushroom trip what you want them to see. They\u2019ll find their own thing,\u201d he argued. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt the end of the day, that is what\u2019s great about what lots of us in the room, in film and TV, is offering people drugs,\u201d Armstrong added. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Succession creator Jesse Armstrong came to Banff World Media Festival on Tuesday to praise U.K. actors Peter Capaldi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[19401,430,516,156,241697,111,139,69,14939],"class_list":["post-480606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-brian-cox","tag-celebrities","tag-elon-musk","tag-entertainment","tag-jesse-armstrong","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-succession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}