‘Succession’ Star Brian Cox Says That He’s The Only Cast Member Who Knew About That Finale Twist In Advance

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Succession’s Season 3 finale, which you should really probably watch if you haven’t already.

Succession has always been top shelf when it comes to genuinely shocking, unpredictable hairpin turns. But on Sunday’s season finale, it may have topped itself. The episode found the three younger Roy children (which is to say, not Connor, who was busy guilt-tripping his girlfriend into marriage) thinking they’d found a way to thwart paterfamilias Logan (Brian Cox) from selling the company. They were wrong. Logan won, because he always wins. And he had some help: Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) and Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun).

It was a surprise to the cast, too, of course. But some of them knew that the Tomelette and Gregs would betray the Roy kids (including Tom’s wife, Sarah Snook’s Shiv) before everyone else. In a kind of Season 3 exit interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cox revealed that, in true Logan fashion, he was several steps ahead of everyone else:

“Well, I kind of knew that was going to happen. I was the one person who knew about that all the way through — I had been informed. Normally, I don’t want to know about the scripts. But I was informed that was the trajectory we were going to go down. It was a little different from what they suggested, but it actually did come true.”

Now, Macfadyen, in an interview with GQ, said that he also knew about what Tom would do “quite early on,” saying he had a “rough idea of how it might end up but I was fully prepared for it to change.” But it’s not clear what the timeline was here — if showrunner Jesse Armstrong told Cox first, then Macfadyen, then everyone else later.

Cox was also asked about another stand-out bit in the season finale: Is Logan really going to have a kid, and in his 70s The actor who plays him, though, was a bit vague:

“I think there may be an element of that that’s true if we take it historically — if we look at examples of that, guys in late life having children. I think that there is probably an element of truth in it. But it’s not a road I want to go down because it’s still ambiguous. I think it’s pretty ambiguous, but there’s room for a certain truth in it and there’s also room for the fact that it’s just him trying to be healthy.”

It was quite the finale, and everyone will have to be very patient to find out what happens next. In the meantime, you can always check out other shows by Armstrong, including the comedies Peep Show, which he co-created; The Thick of It, on which he was a writer; and the latter’s movie spinoff In the Loop, which if anything manages to feature even better swearing and insults than the already very blue Succession.