BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — Tony Cox prayed.

He had done quite a bit of it in his life. Growing up in the Black Belt, where there were many challenges for him as a little person standing at 3’6″, Cox had prayed he’d find his purpose. As an actor, he prayed through hard times when the only available work was often demeaning to those with dwarfism. In an early role in the TV show “The Greatest American Hero,” Cox was credited as “Circus Dwarf.” Even a little screen time in “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” felt small because he was only in a costume playing one of the bear-like Ewoks.

Then, in 2002, Cox prayed again. This time, it was for a part that seemingly every little person in Hollywood was going after: the role of Marcus, the mall-store elf-turned heist mastermind in “Bad Santa.”

On paper, Marcus was nothing like Cox. In “Bad Santa,” Marcus is an angry, foul-mouthed thief often at odds with Willie, his alcoholic, safecracker partner whose own demons often put their plans to rob the mall they work for in constant jeopardy. Those who know Cox best described the 65-year-old actor and father as funny, down-to-earth, and deeply rooted in his faith.

In reality, Marcus was one of the best little person characters that Cox had ever read.

“In 23 years working as an actor at that time, I had never seen a role like that,” Cox said. “Those are roles you dream of.”

So, with his wife, Otelia, Cox prayed that he would get the part, that he would finally have a chance to show what he could do as an actor.

“I wanted that role so bad and I prayed about it,” he said.

Through several auditions, as well as the support of director Terry Zwigoff and co-star Billy Bob Thornton, Cox landed the role of Marcus and “Bad Santa” went on to become both a critical and commercial success. It had finally happened: over 20 years into his career and Cox had become an overnight success.

“It changed everything,” Cox said.

But before there was Tony Cox the actor, there was “Little Tony” who had dreams beyond his small hometown of Uniontown, Alabama.

Uniontown

Born in New York City, Cox was taken to Uniontown to live with his grandparents, Lottie Jones Witherspoon and Henry Jones, while his mother, a social worker, stayed behind so she could work, sending money back home when she could. Even by the 1960s, Uniontown was still a small town, with barely 2,000 people living there. But Cox didn’t care. Looking back on it, Cox said that as a little person, being in Alabama was the best thing that could’ve happened to him growing up.

“I had a great childhood,” he said. “I never had a problem with anyone.”

Bettie Jimerson, Cox’s cousin, remembers the many operations he underwent as a child to try and stretch out his legs. The constant procedures meant that Cox was often on crutches while in elementary school, but the kids in the neighborhood would always go out of their way to include him, often pulling him around in a little wagon on their adventures.

“What sticks out with me is the fact he didn’t want to be treated any differently from other boys that were his age,” Jimerson said, adding how Cox often played basketball and touch football with the other children. “Whatever they were involved in, he wanted to be involved, too.”

The most important person in Cox’s life was his grandmother, Lottie Jones Witherspoon, the woman who bought him a drum set to start his own band, Tony and the Real Thing, and bought him his first car–a Ford Galaxie 500–when he turned 16.

“He was her heart and she was his heart,” Jimerson said.

As much as Cox enjoyed his childhood, the constant reminders of his size would sometimes get to him. When he was 4 years old, Cox barely stood above his grandfather’s kneecap. Remembering how his grandmother would get him to drink his milk by telling him it would make him grow, Cox would gulp down as much of it as he could, hoping it would make him taller. Then, by the first day of third grade in 1967, he saw how much his classmates had grown over the summer. He, however, had not.

Cox went back home, sad and feeling hopeless.

“I said ‘Mama, you said milk would make me grow. Look at me, everybody in school is taller than I am and I haven’t grown not one inch,'” Cox remembers.

Without skipping a beat, his grandmother told Cox something he would never forget.

“She said ‘There are some people who are tall and there are people who are very tall. There are people who are short and there are people who are very short. Those people who are very short become famous,'” Cox said.

That was the last time Cox worried about his size. He knew that as a little person, there would always be certain obstacles, but as far as he was concerned, her words were permission to go find his place in the world.

“I always felt like from that time that I was going to be somebody famous and I went from there,” he said. “That started it all.”

Jimerson, however, always felt that Cox would do something big, mostly because he never thought about what he could or couldn’t do; he just did it.

“He’s always believed in himself. That was the main thing,” she said. “There are a lot of kids who give up on life, but Tony, those thoughts never came in his mind.”

After graduating from Robert C. Hatch High School in 1976, Cox went to Alabama State University in Montgomery with a plan to study music. However, he hit a wall when he realized–being unable to read music–how far behind he was. Learning how to play the drums when he was 2, Cox could pick up different beats and rhythms he heard, but by the time he had made it to high school, the music program had already folded.

The way Cox described it, once he realized how far behind he was, he knew he had to find something else to do. What about acting?

“I just felt I could do it,” he said. “I had seen Billy Barty and I just felt I could do it.”

Cox credits Barty and Michael Dunn, both little people who worked as actors, as two of his biggest influences. Barty had been in films and television since the 1930s while Dunn was best known as Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless in the 1960s TV show “The Wild Wild West.” Cox remembers Barty’s guest-starring role in an episode of “Little House on the Prairie” where Barty, playing a thief rejected by society, became a hero by saving a girl who had fallen down a well.

“It made me cry,” Cox said.

With no acting program at ASU, Cox listened to family friends in California who encouraged him to pursue his Hollywood dreams out there. While thinking about what he wanted to do, Cox asked Jimerson for her thoughts.

“When I told her what I planned on doing, she said, ‘Let me think about it,’ which I was shocked by,” he said. “I thought she would tell me right away, ‘I think you should go to California, you know, and do it.'”

Admittedly, Jimerson was saddened by the idea of Cox leaving Alabama, but she thought long and hard about what Cox wanted to do. Then, the following day, she tapped on the window of Cox’s ground-floor dorm room to talk to him.

“I told him that he should go for it,” she said.

Looking back, Jimerson believes that if he had stayed, Cox would have had a hard time with campus life.

“For one thing, there was a lot of walking on campus,” Jimerson said. “There were buildings that didn’t have access to elevators. He had to pull stairs, and that wasn’t good on him.”

Cox was at ASU for three weeks before he decided to leave college behind and by January 1977, had made his way out to California to give acting a shot.

“To me, that was it. It was that or bust. There was no in-between,” Cox said. “I had to make it.”

Hollywood

Whereas Cox was the only little person in Uniontown growing up, coming to Hollywood meant coming into a large community of little people working in the entertainment business. In Ryan Steven Green’s documentary “The Hollywood Shorties,” a big part of this was owed to “The Wizard of Oz,” which employed over 100 little people to play Munchkins in the film. Then, by the 1940s, Los Angeles had one of the largest populations of little people in the world.

Nonetheless, parts for little people were not always the best, with actors often being relegated to roles like elves, leprechauns, or punchlines

“A lot of them are never given the chance because they’re used as a sight gag,” said Terry Zwigoff, who directed Cox in “Bad Santa.”

Cox remembers how demeaning one of his first auditions was.

“I just felt like a piece of meat,” he said. “The guy said, ‘The only work you’ll do is in costumes.”

Undeterred, Cox went on to study at Merrick Studio School of Acting. Studying the craft, Cox not only learned about improvisation, but also how to make the lines his own.

“To me, I didn’t think I was really funny, but I know how to find the funny stuff in a script,” he said.

A year and a half after heading out West, Cox started finding work, first doing commercials. In fact, it was on one commercial for Burger Chef that he was able to work with Barty.

“He taught me how to be professional,” he said. “He was the man.”

Cox landed his first movie role in the 1980 comedy “Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype” with Oliver Reed. Cox, who was 23 years old at the time, playing “Bad William” in an overdubbed performance where he used nunchucks . He then started appearing on TV, with one of his first big breaks playing one of the dwarves in a retelling of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” on “Faerie Tale Theatre” in 1984.

“Tony Cox, looking and sounding like a diminutive Eddie Murphy, is especially entertaining as Bubba the blabbermouth,” TV critic John O’Connor wrote in The New York Times.

In addition to acting, Cox was also active in the 1980s with the Hollywood Shorties, a Harlem Globetrotters-esque basketball team entirely comprised of little people working in Hollywood. He then had a short stint with the L.A. Breakers.

Throughout the next 20 years, Cox found steady work in a wide range of films, from “Beetlejuice” and “Willow” to “Friday,” TV shows like “Martin,” “In Living Color” and “Fraiser” and even music videos with artists like Michael Jackson, Eminem and Snoop Dogg.

Still, Cox felt like there was more he could offer.

“I didn’t want to do costumes all my life,” he said.

‘Bad Santa’

Coming off the Oscar-nominated “Ghost World,” Terry Zwigoff was in demand as a director. One week in 2002, Zwigoff received two scripts: one for “Bad Santa” and another for “Elf,” which comedian Will Ferrell was already attached to star in.

Zwigoff let his wife read “Elf” first to see what she thought.

“She said, ‘It’s going to make tens of millions of dollars. You should do it,’” Zwigoff said.

Reading the script for “Elf” himself, Zwigoff was at a loss for words, and laughs.

“I said, ‘I love Will Ferrell, but this is just silly stuff for children. I don’t find any of this funny. I can’t do it. I’m not laughing out loud. How would I even know when a take is good?’” he said.

“Elf” would go on to be released in 2003–the same year as “Bad Santa– and make over $220 million worldwide, cementing Ferrell as a comedy star.

Reading the script for “Bad Santa,” however, was a whole different experience for the director.

“”I thought it was so great,” he said. “My agent sent it to me and said, “Don’t get your heart set on making it, because no studio is going to finance this.”

Like many movies, different actors were considered for the leads of “Bad Santa.” Eventually, Billy Bob Thornton won the main role of Willie, the hard-drinking, self-destructive safecracker posing as a mall Santa Claus.

However, finding the right actor to play Marcus, Willie’s partner in crime, would be a much harder task for Zwigoff.

“The role of Marcus in ‘Bad Santa’ was so well written that there was really, every person of short stature across the country auditioning for it,” Zwigoff said.

One peculiar moment Zwigoff remembered in the casting process was when Mickey Rooney, an actor who had been working in Hollywood since the 1920s, auditioned for Marcus. For a brief period in the 1930s, Rooney–who stood at 5’2″–was the top movie star in the world.

“Some parts of it were absolutely genius, but other times were too odd,” he said. “I wanted to let him down easy because he really wanted the part.”

Then there was Peter Dinklage, who would go on to worldwide fame with “Game of Thrones,” as well as movies like “The Station Agent” and “Elf.”

“I love Dinklage. He’s a great actor. I thought he was going to be great. Anyone who can read these lines truthfully will be great,'” Zwigoff said. “He came in, read the lines absolutely truthfully, and they weren’t funny. I have no idea why.”

However, everything changed when Zwigoff met Cox, whom he remembered seeing in several bit parts in films, including the 1999 film “Me, Myself and Irene” with Jim Carrey. Cox felt like he could play Marcus. For one, it was one of the best roles for a little person that he had ever read. For another, he felt like he understood what his role was in the story.

“The one thing is for me, if you see the movie, I’m really the boss, even though Billy is the big star,” he said when discussing how he tried to figure out the character.

For Zwigoff, he wanted Marcus to feel like a character that could go toe to toe with anyone in the film and feel like a grounded character.

“I tried to make him as three-dimensional as I could,” he said. “That’s always the goal. Otherwise, it’s not interesting. It just becomes a Mad Magazine sight gag.

With a little encouragement from Zwigoff, Cox tried out different things in his audition, ad-libbing and creating different scenarios. The result was undeniable.

“He read it the first time and I was on the floor laughing,” Zwigoff said.

However, Zwigoff faced an uphill battle trying to cast Cox for the role. For one, the producers did not want him, wanting to go with another actor. Cox would audition for the role of Marcus six times before he won the part.

“At a certain point, I couldn’t see anyone else in the role because he was so good,” Zwigoff said. “It boiled down to me having to threaten to quit if they didn’t hire him. Eventually, they let me hire him.”

The movie would go on to be an enormous hit, raking in over $76 million worldwide and launching Cox’s career as a leading man.

Twenty years after “Bad Santa,” Cox is still recognized on a near-daily basis for the movie that he was initially not supposed to be in, but whose talent made him undeniable.

“Wherever I go, people want to talk about ‘Bad Santa,'” Cox said. “That’s really the movie, I think, that put me on the map.” 

Zwigoff said a big part of why “Bad Santa” worked was Cox.

“He just cracks you up,” he said. “He had an approach that was very authentic to himself.”

Zwigoff said that 20 years later, the film continues to have its own life as a cult classic, especially around the holidays.

“I get told all the time ‘My family watches it every Christmas. It’s a tradition,'” he said. “From that aspect, it’s become part of the culture and inspired so many things.”

While Zwigoff found so much of “Bad Santa” to be funny and inspired, he couldn’t say the same for its 2016 sequel, “Bad Santa 2,” where Thornton and Cox reprised their roles.

“The only thing I found funny about it at all was Tony,” he said. “It was a pretty bad script.”

Stepping away

Following the success of “Bad Santa,” Cox began receiving more work in TV and movies, this time as prominent supporting characters. Many of the films that followed, such as “Who’s Your Caddy?” and “The Warrior’s Way,” seemed to be pale imitations of Cox’s role as Marcus, while others, such as “Date Movie” and “Disaster Movies,” leaned more into low-brow humor.

However, Cox never felt like he was being typecast. For him, comedy was what he was best at.

“My thing is making people laugh, especially with everything going on in the world,” he said.

However, Cox is far from Marcus in “Bad Santa” or the other foul-mouthed imitations that came afterward. Cox, a Christian who regularly goes to church in Los Angeles, has had to reconcile the characters he plays with his faith.

“I just ask for forgiveness and he’s a forgiving God,” Cox said. “That’s it.”

In fact, contrary to many of the roles he’s played, Cox leans heavily on his faith in God, as seen by a wooden cross necklace his cousin made him that he has worn publicly for over 20 years.

“I don’t go anywhere without it,” he said. “I feel like I’m covered with it. It’s that feeling of being protected.”

As foul-mouthed as Cox got playing Marcus in “Bad Santa,” even he had times where he felt like the line had been crossed, like one line disparaging religion.

“There were some things I wouldn’t do,” he said.

Stepping away

Following the release of “Bad Santa 2” in 2016, Cox took time off to undergo hip replacement surgery. Then, with fewer roles being offered that he was interested in doing, the then-58-year-old Cox decided that maybe it was time to step away from acting.

“When you tend to get older, Hollywood tends to phase you out,” he said. “A friend said ‘Why don’t you retire’ and I thought that was a good idea, so I decided to retire.”

Cox said he has enjoyed time out of the spotlight, spending time with his family and being able to drive around Los Angeles on his own time. However, about two years ago, he started feeling the itch to possibly make a comeback, mostly inspired by the many fans he meets on a daily basis.

“So many people were saying ‘You need to come back,'” he said. “They haven’t seen me in a while, so they care what happened.”

Aa he slowly dips his toe back into acting, Cox said there are things he’d like to do. Recently, he and a few friends of his wrote a screenplay that he described as a “good-friend comedy movie” about the Mafia he’d like to get made. Cox said he’d also like to do a movie where he could play off another comedian, like the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder film “Stir Crazy.”

“It would need to be a good role where I can do my thing and do it the way I want to do it,” he said.

One project Cox has had an especially keen interest for a while is doing a travel show where he can meet and talk with people from all walks of life. It’s something that was inspired by the many places he goes where he is recognized, even overseas.

“I’m just surprised how many people know me and all the way through the year, they get crazy,” he said. “Even in places like Australia or New Zealand, people will stop me and say ‘Bad Santa.’”

Zwigoff said he always looks for things to work on with Cox. After “Bad Santa,” he went on to direct “Art School Confidential” in 2006, his last film to date. Over the years, Zwigoff has tried to get other projects off the ground, including a TV show he once tried to do with Cox back in 2008 called “King’s Court,” where Cox would’ve played the owner of donut shop who had big dreams.

“The idea was a largely black cast in an area of LA that was in an apartment complex,” he said. “It wasn’t about race, but it was about class. I thought it was really funny and he loved it.”

However, the project never came together.

“I sent it to HBO and they said ‘I don’t know, we already have a Black show,'” he said.

Over the last three years, Zwigoff has been developing another TV show with “Bad Santa” writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa that he hopes to pitch next year. He said that if it goes, he’d love to find a part for Cox to play.

“I’m trying to dream up a part for him,” he said.

Throughout his career, those close to Cox have noted how he never lost himself to fame.

“He’s a very kind person, very nice guy and I find him funny. That’s enough for me,” Zwigoff said said. “I would have more friends if I could find someone like that.”

For Jimerson, becoming a movie star never went to Cox’s head.

“He’s just plain old country boy Tony Cox,” she said.