JASON ISAACS

L’BEAUTÉ HOMME What did you want to be when you grew up?

JASON ISAACS I always wanted to be grown up. When I was a kid, I had friends older than me. I always pretended to be grown up, hanging around with groups of people who were adults, because they drove cars and I didn’t, I was 14. I always wanted to be older and get away from my family and parents and be my own thing, but I had no idea what that was. And to be honest, I still don’t know. I went to study law not because I was interested, but because I didn’t want to do any of the things I’d done at school and it was a new subject you could do at university. Then I found theatre and I loved the fact that in a rehearsal room I didn’t have to be me and all of the things that made me self-conscious about being me were left outside and everybody was supposedly a blank slate and there was instant intimacy, like you didn’t have to pretend things. I realized I’d spent all of my life pretending to be something in different groups of people. Whoever I was with I would want to be whatever I thought they needed to hear and see, so I’m glad I ended up in this profession where I get to do and be a thousand people.

LBH You’ve played many morally complex characters, not necessarily all villains, let’s say, but do you think these roles naturally come to you or have you chosen them?

JI Well, first of all, people do offer me things that are similar to things I’ve done before. That’s how casting works. And I say no, almost always, if I think it’s a repetition. But that’s one of the things that fascinates me about life and then where it overlaps with my work that everybody thinks they’re always doing the right thing. And if I read a script and the character is there to annoy or scare the audience or the protagonist but I don’t believe them and that isn’t a person who would look in the mirror and think they were on the right side of history and I don’t do it because I don’t believe them. And that isn’t a person who would look in the mirror and think they were on the right side of history. And I don’t do it because I don’t think that the audience will believe me, because I won’t believe myself. Am I drawn to them? I’m drawn to the best writing I can. One of the reasons we got so much attention The White Lotus is because Mike White is a brilliant writer and all the characters are three-dimensional and human. And in over the 37 years I’ve been an actor, the times that I’ve had a ton of attention or praise, I never leave a single syllable of it because I always knew when I read the script that it was something special and if I didn’t fuck it up, I would get credit that was due to somebody else.

LBH So would you say these characters are never two-dimensional?

JI Maybe Lucuis Malfoy [from Harry Potter] could be more two-dimensional. He’s a racist, but he doesn’t think that, he’s a eugenicist. He doesn’t think that blood should mix. And it might be a magical world, but the reason it resonated so much is the parallels in the real world are so impossible to avoid. He doesn’t think that wizard blood should mix with muggle blood. Well, we don’t need to look too far to find people all over who think like that! So he believes he’s in the right. So, am I drawn to morally complex characters? No. I’m drawn to really well-written characters because then I look better as an actor and it makes my job easier.

LBH Tell us about getting involved in the way Lucuis looked. Did you imagine him like that?

JI I mean, I always try to get involved wherever I can with anything, the whole picture. And yes, I believe anytime you put something on in the morning, you’re sending a signal to the people around you about who you are. Even if the signal is, “please don’t judge me”, I’m trying to be neutral. It’s still a signal. A signal about which subculture you want to be associated with, either politically or economically or anything. So yeah, when you play a character, every part of them, how they speak, what they wear, how they walk, and if you’re lucky as a male actor you get to change the look, although as men, we don’t get to do as much with our hair and makeup, which is why when I can wear a wig I will. With Lucius, I didn’t think he should or would want to look like a muggle. He came from old, old money. Like thousands of years old money. So he wouldn’t dress like the modern world because he wanted to turn the clock back. 

“Ask me a long question, I’m going to take a bite of my sandwich,” Isaacs jokes as he eats a vegan sandwich with breaded eggplant and tomato. When I congratulate him on not eating meat and tell him I’d like to do the same, he replies with his characteristic dry humor, “Don’t do it, it’s a real nightmare.”

LBH OK. So, you’ve spoken about the psychological toll of really getting into a character and you do these things for months, how do you “recover” or shake them off?

JI Well, I try not to carry them home. I have a wife and children and a life and friends. But when you’re doing it, there’s a misconception with the public I think, which is that you decide where to crack your voice or you pull a face or you construct this thing from the outside. And proper acting, particularly on film, proper acting is from the inside out. The camera can tell when you’re lying. So yes, you’re not becoming the thing, absolutely, it’s not a magical transformation, but as far as you can emotionally, imaginatively, you live the inner life of the person and some bits of it emerge, maybe the things you say or the things you do, but you’re filling up the iceberg from the inside. So when you’re living a dark life with dark thoughts like the guy in The White Lotus, or I played a very, very violent man who was equally suicidal and damaged by the memories of the things he’d done to other people, and I remember feeling that being something I really needed to wash off. It gave me a very dark perspective on the world. If you’re doing it properly and the script warrants it, it can take you over. I’m perfectly able to stop when I get in the car to go home, but your cells carry these things. If you’re violent all day or your grief is stricken all day, at an age now where I’m continually playing someone who’s lost a child, constantly playing someone whose children are dead. Because drama is about extreme things happening to people. And I have a good friend who’s older than me who said to me, “don’t worry darling, the dementia parts are coming for you.” And he’s played Alzheimer’s five times in the last two years. So yeah, I don’t want to make it sound like those actors who make it sound like a difficult job, there are people out there fighting fires, and there are people out there actually fighting for their lives and doing a billion things that are much harder. But when you’re in the moment as an actor, you’re really in the moment and you’re experiencing the things as close as possible that your characters are experiencing.

LBH Talk to me about your relationship with fame, especially with how it’s changed lately and the level of conversation that shows like The White Lotus create; it really is a lot of attention.

JI Oh wow. The show did something that nobody could have predicted and that hasn’t happened for decades. I think when I was a kid there were Dallas and Dynasty films and everybody was talking about who shot JR. But I don’t know if that penetrated like The White Lotus has, which is every country, seemingly every demographic. I’ve been inside the bubble, but we’ve all traveled all over the world publicizing it and it stunned me to arrive in Spain and see that it had the same reach that it had in London that it had in Los Angeles. I don’t know, I’ve been just the right level of fame pretty much all of my working life in that I go to the supermarket every day and I take the tube and I walk the streets. There’s two types of actors really and they can both do the job very well. One is someone who has something special, they walk in a room, they’re charismatic or they’re sexy or there’s something and that’s what they sell and then there’s people like me who come from the more European tradition and maybe the East Coast tradition here where we want to disappear and become someone else. And in order to do that, one of the great tools you have is the ability to be an observer and walk around and listen to people or to shadow people in their life. And so being recognizable is not helpful. It also makes me very self-conscious. That’s not who I like to be or why I like to do it. So I go to film premieres or whatever and I’m sorry to say that –I have said this before in an interview– but if I can persuade my wife to come with me, which she rarely does because she doesn’t like it, we go into the limousine, we get out, and when there’s a crowd there, they all scream my name, and I do photographs and sign things. She takes the car home early. I walk around, get a bowl of soup in Chinatown, and then I take the tube home, and no one gives me a second look. I’m just not someone that people recognize. Maybe they don’t think that I’d be someone they’ve seen on their TV, in the places they see me, but I wear headphones often, but there’s nothing playing, so I like to listen to people’s conversation. These last few weeks have been completely different, but come back and check in a year, that it will fade again, and that I will be able to, you know, anonymously blend black into any crowd anywhere. I hope so. Because I have friends who are much more famous and their lives are so enormously compromised. Not that they deserve any sympathy, but that’s not the way I’d like either my life or my work to go. I mean, I think they kind of do deserve a little sympathy just because we’re all in great privilege working at something that we love. 

LBH You have two daughters, a wife. Tell me what you think is women’s biggest superpower.

JI Easy. That their egos don’t get in the way. The men’s egos get in the way so much as little boys are told that you should be the I don’t know what little boys I don’t remember what the hell I was told. But I watch… my wife couldn’t bond with any woman anyway. She came to the set of Thailand and instantly all the women… and she were a unit. She knows all the women in our local neighbourhood. They’re all friendly with each other. They swim with each other, they exercise with each other, they commiserate with each other, they nurse each other. I don’t watch men or I don’t see men able to do those things. I try, I lean into that stuff. I hope I become more able to do those things. Having daughters changed my life completely. I’ve been with my wife quite a while before we had a child, but it was a little bit like a magic eye picture, or what they call a dolly zoom shot. Suddenly the world took on an entirely different perspective for me. I’m embarrassed that it took that for me to understand how different the world is for women and see where barriers are or where other people’s prejudices get in the way. But anyway, at least I’m grateful that it happened.