He made the role of Bourne his own and helped redefine the action movie in such a way that James Bond was forced to take a far grittier tone to keep up.
The Bourne Identity hit the screens 20 years ago and gave Matt Damon a blockbuster franchise as the amnesia-suffering secret agent searching for the answers to his past.
The movie, however, was unforgettable for Brian Cox who portrayed CIA boss Ward Abbott which pulled in his biggest payday and saw him rise up the Hollywood ladder.
And the Dundee actor recently reflected on the 2002 spy thriller and reprising his role in the 2004 sequel where his final scene posed some continuity issues with his hair.
As Cox said: Once you see it, you can never unsee it!
From the Palace of Versailles to Prague
It’s odd to think that Matt Damon wasn’t many people’s choice for the lead role when plans to adapt Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity were first unveiled in 2000.
Damon had a string of well-regarded roles to his name early in his career, from Saving Private Ryan to The Talented Mr Ripley.
He also won an Oscar for writing Good Will Hunting with best friend Ben Affleck – and all before he was 30.
But then his career hit a slump as people began to wonder if his boyish good looks and understated acting would hinder his ability to carry films on his own.
Both Russell Crowe and Sylvester Stallone were considered ahead of him but Doug Liman, who directed the first Bourne movie, knew Damon was a fan of the character and felt he understood what was required to play the amnesiac government super-spy.
He was right.
Liman began assembling the rest of the cast, which included Franka Potente, Julia Stiles, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje.
Cox was filming The Affair of the Necklace with Hilary Swank, Adrien Brody and Christopher Walken in the Palace of Versailles when he got the call from Liman.
This was the second filmed stab at author Robert Ludlum’s best-selling espionage tale, following the 1988 TV mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain.
In his autobiography, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, he wrote: “The call came from Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity, and it goes without saying that I signed up, and so, not long after having filmed at Louis XIV’s abode, I was in Prague for the first Bourne movie.
People say you can’t tell, but I can guarantee that now you know, you won’t be able to unsee it.”
Brian Cox
“I have to say, I had a great time doing it.
“Chris Cooper I loved. Matt Damon too. The director, Doug, well, he remained a somewhat, let’s just say, ‘eccentric’ figure.
“I wouldn’t say he was self-sabotaging, exactly, just that he would tend to get a bee in his bonnet about something and be unwilling to let it go.
“He was great with visuals, although not so great with narrative.”
What was the story about?
An Italian fishing boat crew working off the coast of Marseille finds an unconscious man adrift in the Mediterranean and drags him aboard.
He is alive, but comatose, with two bullets buried in his back and a dinky, mini-laser pen planted in his thigh.
When this is then dug out by a French fisherman with surgical skills, it projects a Swiss bank account number on to the fishing boat bulkhead.
Damon wakes up to complete memory loss.
The boat puts in at Marseilles and the mystery man shoots off to Switzerland, where a safe deposit box awaits him, containing several passports, wads of different currencies, a gun, and possible clues to why he was floating, bullet-riddled, in mid-Med.
The amnesiac grabs the lot and leaves the Swiss bank, busy trying to get his head round the implications of his booty.
However, his mind soon turns to other things – like staying alive.
People are after him – lone-wolf assassins, clandestine spy-type puppet-masters, and the uniformed masses of several police forces.
Assisted by old-style-Mini driver and chance travelling companion Marie, he heads on a hairy trip across Europe to Paris, to what seems like a home address, and hopefully some answers.
It was action all the way for the CIA assassin with amnesia and was a movie you couldn’t take your eyes away from or miss a line of script.
Cox returned in 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy.
Paul Greengrass took the reins from Liman for the sequel, which delivered breathlessly choreographed hand-to-hand combat and a jaw-dropping car chase through Moscow.
Cox described it in his memoir as “one of the best in cinema history”.
But nothing’s ever simple in Bourne’s world.
Sure enough, before long, he was up to his neck and still playing a deadly game of cat and mouse with his shadowy CIA bosses, including Cox’s major antagonist.
Cox said just as much friction developed without the cameras rolling.
There were tussles between credited writer Tony Gilroy and Brian Helgeland, who did an uncredited rewrite, as well as Greengrass, who was also working on the script.
“Perhaps I should have requested a credit myself,” he said.
“The final scene of The Bourne Supremacy, where my character, Ward Abbott, reveals all to Bourne, was shot no fewer than five times, and on one such occasion, Matt and I even wrote a version together, which we performed outside the building.
“A very fine job we did of it, too, even if I do say so myself.
“We shot three of those endings, and having done that, I dusted myself off, thinking the job was done, and scarpered off to do Uncle Varick at the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh, marking a return there having directed and starred in The Master Builder by Ibsen in 1993.”
Cox returned to the Scottish stage to take the title role in John Byrne’s new version of Uncle Vanya, which reset Chekhov’s tale in the far north-east of Scotland in 1964.
Having asked to read the script, Cox was so enthusiastic about the part that the Lyceum rearranged their spring programme to fit in with his filming schedule.
Then he got a call from the Bourne people, who told him: “There’s going to be a plane waiting to fly you to Germany. We’re doing some pick ups.”
Pick-ups and reshoots themselves can pose significant continuity issues.
Cox said: “By this stage I was in full-on, moustachioed Uncle Varick mode, not clean-shaven Ward Abbot mode.
“Even so, off I went, back to Bourne, where I was fitted with a wig and had to shave, and if you watch the film it does indeed look glaringly obvious that Ward Abbott has changed his look quite considerably in the meantime.
“People say you can’t tell, but I can guarantee that now you know, you won’t be able to unsee it.”
Bourne spares Abbott’s life and leaves him with his gun.
Cox’s CIA bigwig takes his own life.
Even the fact he was written out couldn’t take the shine off Cox’s time in the Bourne franchise, which two decades on he says was “overall a great experience”.
He said: “What’s more, The Bourne Identity changed my status as an actor.
“I guess you could say that it was the first of the big payday films.
“After that came Troy, X-Men, another Bourne.
“I was in a new league.”
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