There’s a haunted moment at the heart of Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky’s new biopic, Churchill.

It depicts legendary British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who led Britain through WWII, standing on a mist-shrouded beach, surrounded by the broken bodies of Gallipoli, washed by a sea of foaming blood.

Churchill, played by an unrecognisable Brian Cox (Medici: Masters of Florence, The Bourne Identity), stands on a British beach many years later, in the crucial days before the amphibious D-Day landings at Normandy.

“Gallipoli hung over him,” Cox tells The New Daily. “Possibly he was guilty of the sin of hubris a little bit in relationship to Gallipoli. He didn’t want that to happen again, and it very nearly did.”

Dundee-born Cox’s Scottish accent rumbles with gravitas. Having shed most of the weight he piled on for the role and regrown his hair, he nods to Churchill as a Renaissance man, but is keenly aware history has rewritten him as an indomitable force.

“The Churchill of the speeches, full of rhetoric sensibility, and the Churchill of private life were entirely different,” Cox says.

“I mean, he was a salesman and he was bolstering the people at home. But the private guy, he was a depressive, the black dog, the man who had to drink rather a bit too much, you know champagne in the morning, brandy at lunch, whisky in the evening.”

While Churchill’s historical record is certainly divisive, Cox says he did what had to be done.

Brian Cox minus the Churchillian makeup.

“He was this curious thing which Mandela was, and Napoleon. He was a man of destiny. He fought that war and he won it.”

Written by Alex von Tunzelmann, Churchill is a sterling war film that does not go to war, but hovers in the darkness of doubt, as the Prime Minister, in London, is overwhelmed by the enormity of what may yet be another hopeless massacre.

Cox is staggeringly good at conveying that tumult, with Miranda Richardson also magnificent as Churchill’s wife Clementine, both a rock to lean on and a force to be reckoned with when he wallows in self-pity.

“I fell in love with Miranda years ago when I saw Dancing with a Stranger, which I still think is one of the greatest performances of all time,” Cox says, adding that working with her was like playing world-class tennis.

“When Roger Federer meets Nadal, the game goes up. When you act with someone like Miranda, your game immediately has to improve.”

Cox received an email from The Crown’s John Lithgow welcoming him to the fraternity of men who have played Churchill, an honour roll he had to put from his mind.

“You can’t really think on it because you’d go nuts. Albert Finney was pretty amazing, and Richard Burton, and now we’ve got John and Gary Oldman. It’s a pretty amazing bunch but I don’t think he’s ever been portrayed like this before, the sensitive man. And that’s down to Alex’s script. When I read it I just said, ‘this is a gift’.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVOzMZ4IrMA