Brian Cox + Oriel FeldmanHall

What happens when members of a family dynasty compete for power? Love collides with loyalty, and ambition often triumphs over wisdom. In other words, drama ensues, as in Shakespeare’s King Lear and the HBO series Succession. Actor Brian Cox has starred in both—he earned acclaim in the National Theater production of King Lear in the 1990s and is embarking on the second of Succession, playing Logan Roy, the patriarch of a dysfunctional media family—and he can speak to the parallels between the two stories. “Logan’s need for control is reminiscent of classical stories like King Lear,” he says. “He’s at a point where he wants to let go, but he can’t. Now, there are reasons of his own vanity that he can’t. But there are reasons that the children aren’t ready to run the show.”

With social neuroscientist Oriel FeldmanHall, Cox explores how power can trap the very people who hold it (or believe that they do), and what they might discover if they could only let go.

About the Speakers

Brian Cox is a Scottish actor who, beyond his memorable King Lear for the National Theater, as garnered two Olivier Awards for his work on the London stage. His first appearance on Broadway was in Tom Stoppard’s Rock’n’Roll. Of his more than 200 film and TV credits, he was the original Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Manhunt, and has since appeared in Braveheart, Troy, Rob Roy, two Wes Anderson films Rushmore and The Fantastic Mr. Fox; Running with Scissors, L.I.E., The 25th Hour, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, Adaptation, X-Men 2, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and recently as Winston Churchill in Jonathan Teplitzky’s Churchill.

Oriel FeldmanHall received her Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University before being appointed Assistant Professor in the Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences department at Brown University. In 2016, Dr. FeldmanHall won the Association for Psychological Science Rising Star Award, in recognition of innovative work that has already advanced the field. She also recently won the prestigious NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, which provides support for the most promising young scientists conducting neurobiological research. Dr FeldmanHall’s research seeks to disentangle the cognitive and neural processes behind the complex choices that form the basis of human social behavior. She aims to understand how the brain detects, values, and assesses conflicting reward and punishment contingencies during moral dilemmas, and to examine the role of emotion and its operational power in shaping these social interactions.