The Imperfect Storm

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, by Brian Cox


One hundred pages in, and damn do I feel lucky I never wanted to be an actor. 


Maybe that paints the picture I little too poorly – Brian Cox really does present a great case for why he was meant to be an actor through his nomadic independence and curiosity as a child, but the number of lucky breaks this guy had to get to be successful is insane. 


He had to first know from a very young age that he wanted to be an actor and an actor only, which he himself admits was a stroke of luck. Then, his entire career was kickstarted when an actor happened to leave the local theater, one of Cox’s teacher’s happened to hear about it, and Cox happened to be old enough to fill the opening. Still after that, this theater burned to the ground on a freak accident which gave him a reason to leave Scotland behind and pursue formal acting training in London – and this all happens in the first 50 pages. 


Less lucky on his part was the fact that neither of his parents could care less about him essentially leading his life on his own. His mother, being mentally ill and distant, was never a large part of Cox’s life. And his father, having died an early death when Cox was still a toddler, surely didn’t have any reservations with him up and leaving to London.


A general takeaway I got from the way Cox describes his early years was how persistent and firm-footed you have to be to find any ounce of success in an industry as fickle as entertainment. For most with involved parents, this way of scraping by until a big break comes would be a non-starter as they’d push you towards something more reliable like college or trade school – I know my parents would never allow me to coast by making seemingly nothing of my life for that long. 


But for Brian Cox, in a weird way, the perfect storm of poor parenting, early self-actualization, and a whole lot of luck made it impossible for him to not succeed.


Comments

  1. Tammy KongboonmaSeptember 23, 2022 at 4:56 PM

    Hi Taylor, this is the first time I heard of Putting Rabbit in the Hat. Your take on the book was fun to read and Brian Cox's life surely sounds eventful.

    ReplyDelete

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