In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Jason Isaacs
In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Jason Isaacs talks about the hits, misses, and everything in between that led to his complicated turn on the HBO megahit The White Lotus.
Jason Isaacs played an integral part in one of history’s most successful film series, appeared in major blockbusters directed by the likes of Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay, and has remained a consistent screen presence for more than three decades. But he’s never experienced anything like the attention coming his way for The White Lotus season three.
It’s an unusual case of great, thorny material—Isaacs plays a wealthy financier who faces legal jeopardy, and later suicidal ideation, while on vacation—being embraced by a massive audience. It’s also a lot to deal with. “I’m presuming and hoping things will go back to normal, for me at least. It’s slightly dizzying. It’s a bit like eating 20 desserts. You feel high on it, and something about it feels uncomfortable,” Isaacs says. “I like to be out in the world amongst people, and—this sounds perverse—I don’t like being looked at. Certainly as myself.”
But attention has been tough to avoid. More consistently than ever, he’s getting recognized in public: on the subway, in the supermarket. As Isaacs jumps into a Zoom meeting with me, he admits the press commitments have been exhausting too. Last week Isaacs went viral for an awkward CBS Mornings exchange in which Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil, and Vladimir Duthiers pressed him to reveal whether his full-frontal scene in The White Lotus featured prosthetics. Isaacs declined to answer—“What is the obsession with penises? It’s an odd thing”—and instead called out a gender double standard, arguing that Oscar winner Mikey Madison was not asked about her “vulva” during the campaign for Anora, a film in which she played a sex worker.
This generated some controversy online, which Isaacs is well aware of. “It was horrifying to me for it to look like I don’t understand—and haven’t been horrified by watching—young women being exploited and exposed and abused in so many ways over the years,” he tells me. “What I was trying to say, even if it came out wrong, is [that] even in that context where women have been treated so badly for so long, I still have never witnessed anyone being so specifically grilled about their genitalia. Enjoy the show. Enjoy chatting about ‘Is it a prosthetic or not?’ But don’t grill a 61-year-old actor with, ‘Have I actually seen your actual penis? It’s important for me to know.’ That’s just plain weird.”
It’s basic to understand where he’s coming from, especially because this is all fairly recent to Isaacs. He built a distinctive career on eschewing fame—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
The chameleonic Liverpool native started regularly appearing in films and series in his mid-20s and resisted the pull of Hollywood, even as the town started calling a few years into his career. While working on the 1998 Irish black comedy Divorcing Jack, Isaacs received a call at two in the morning from an agent, with maybe a half dozen people on the line. “We’ve got great news, it can’t wait—Michael Bay wants you to be in Armageddon,” the agent said. Isaacs replied: “Right. Well, that’s nice. Who’s that? What is that?” He got the full breakdown, including the specific offer to portray one of the film’s adolescent astronauts in training—such astronaut roles were eventually accepted by the likes of Ben Affleck and Owen Wilson—but he didn’t say yes. Isaacs was told he needed to get to the set on Tuesday, and he explained why that would not be possible: He wasn’t about to abandon Divorcing Jack.
“They go, ‘Jason, you have to understand something: This is a Bruce Willis project,’” Isaacs says. “I went, ‘Well, you know, this is a David Thewlis project.’” The phone call ended without a clear path forward. But all sides came to a compromise days later: Isaacs accepted a smaller role that required him to film for only eight days, allowing him to do both movies.
The actor tells this story as a kind of thesis statement for the way he’s approached his career. “Numbers of times over the years, I’ve been offered those jobs that other people take and are thrilled with, where you point a gun every day at someone and your biggest decision is ‘blue suit or black suit?’—and you end up with an enormous amount of money and can’t walk down the street, but you have a speedboat and five houses,” he says. “It’s not that I shun the spotlight or anything. I’m just trying to find interesting and good things to do.”
Isaacs’s big-screen breakthrough came a few years after Armageddon, in The Patriot—Emmerich’s bloody Revolutionary War drama starring Mel Gibson. Isaacs jolts the historical film with his deliciously cruel villain, a British colonel who kills Gibson’s character’s son. Isaacs makes every scene feel more tense, more upsetting, more darkly human. The role was originally meant for Jude Law, but the then rising star passed on it, leaving an opening for Isaacs (who’d sent in a self-tape). He made it count.
After the movie came out, “I was offered every bad guy under the sun opposite every single A-list star,” Isaacs says. “They’d look at me like I was speaking Sanskrit. They’re going, ‘But don’t you understand, it’s opposite fill in the blank,’ whatever giant-biceps superstar was fashionable in the day. And I’d go, ‘But it’s a bad part.’” He didn’t take any of those roles, despite his representatives at the time being “clearly interested, for their sake, in money or fame.” Instead, Isaacs chose to do a play at the Royal Court in his home country, then played a trans woman opposite Charlize Theron and Keanu Reeves in the 2001 flop Sweet November. “You can’t be typecast—you can be type-offered,” Isaacs says. “You’re only typecast when you accept the job.”
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