British actor Jason Isaacs talks to Yahoo UK about some of his most memorable movie roles. Isaacs looks back on his lengthy career starting with 1997's sci-fi horror Event Horizon, and touching upon roles such as The Tuxedo with Jackie Chan, working with Ridley Scott, Michael Bay, John Woo, and Armando Iannucci, while also revisiting his iconic work in the Harry Potter films, Peter Pan, Star Trek: Discovery, and Archie, his new ITV series in which he plays Cary Grant.
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00:00 [upbeat music]
00:02 - What was that?
00:07 - Clark's gone.
00:07 Smitty and Cooper are dead.
00:10 - What?
00:11 - What?
00:12 - It was weird.
00:13 You spot him, you take him out.
00:14 [door clanks]
00:15 - Understood.
00:16 There's another one I did that was a flop when it came out.
00:19 And it's been a massive triumph ever since.
00:21 A huge cult film.
00:22 So many other films have copied it since.
00:24 Copied not just its plot, but its style,
00:25 and none of them have quite made it.
00:27 So they made this model of me,
00:28 this extraordinary latex model of me,
00:30 which is every broken vein, every hair,
00:33 mole, eye color and stuff.
00:34 My whole naked body hung up by hooks,
00:37 gutted from neck to navel with all my organs pulled out.
00:40 The shot when I was dead started inside my stomach,
00:42 I think, and pulled out and pulled back,
00:44 and you saw the body and the stuff.
00:46 And I think it was so disgusting.
00:48 Audiences were either throwing up
00:49 or swallowing their sick down,
00:51 but instead the shot starts wide.
00:53 So I know that there was that shot going.
00:54 We also re-shot the ending twice.
00:56 We rewrote the ending after the re-shoot,
00:58 it didn't quite work, and then shot it.
01:00 And then the ending didn't quite work
01:01 and re-shot it again.
01:03 And then we went back and corrected my Latin,
01:05 which we got wrong,
01:06 and I think re-shot a bit of the Latin,
01:08 and it turns out we got the Latin wrong the second time
01:11 and it'd be right the first time, I think.
01:13 - General, if you consider your target,
01:15 composition, dimensions, sheer velocity,
01:20 you could fire every nuke you've got at her
01:21 and she'll just smile at you and keep on coming.
01:24 - What I felt on another scale was the food.
01:26 I've never seen so much food in all my life.
01:29 The biggest breakfast, every kind of breakfast
01:30 you could imagine, and you couldn't imagine,
01:33 there, and then there was, I remember Thai food
01:35 and Chinese food about noon at the side of the set,
01:36 and I took a plate and I said, "Can I have a second?"
01:39 And they went, "You can have as much as you like."
01:41 And just when I put my, just shoveled my fifth plate in,
01:44 they went, "Right, that's lunch!"
01:46 And I went, and there was, you know,
01:47 joints of meat and pasta bars and everything.
01:49 So that was what indicated to me the scale of the film.
01:51 And then there was the fact that we had
01:53 the entire Pentagon as our backdrop.
01:55 - Michael Bay is the loudest, most shouty director
01:59 I've ever come across.
02:00 It was a big, macho film, the big set.
02:02 He did have a microphone, but you know,
02:05 he makes those films that are big, loud, shouty films.
02:07 - This town has given aid to Benjamin Martin
02:13 and his rebels.
02:14 I wish to know his whereabouts.
02:17 So, anyone who comes forward may be forgiven their treason.
02:24 It's on, I think every July the 4th in America.
02:26 And many people come up to me and they say,
02:28 "Oh, my fifth grade history teacher
02:29 "showed me that movie, we loved it."
02:31 And I go, "And then he told you
02:32 "what really happened, right?"
02:34 They go, "What do you mean?"
02:35 So a lot of people think it's a documentary,
02:37 which it really isn't.
02:39 The best bit about "The Patriot"
02:40 is about a month before we were shooting,
02:42 Mel, Heath, and I flew out to South Carolina,
02:45 and we rode horses every day,
02:47 and we learned to load and fire muskets,
02:49 and we did sword fighting, and throw tomahawks.
02:52 And then we'd sit in the hotel at night and go,
02:55 "We're getting paid for this."
02:57 So that was before we started shooting,
02:59 and I would fall off the horse all the time
03:01 and get hit by people's swords.
03:03 - Lucius Malfoy, we meet at last.
03:07 Forgive me.
03:08 - "Widley", "Harry Potter", those films
03:10 are the ones I get least recognized for
03:12 'cause they don't look like me.
03:13 I came up with that wig, that was my idea.
03:16 They wanted me to just have my normal hair.
03:18 At the time I was doing it because
03:19 I wanted every single defense
03:21 against being compared with Alan Rickman.
03:22 He was playing the villain that you've seen so far,
03:25 and I wanted a cane and capes,
03:28 and I would have had a parrot on my shoulder,
03:30 and I don't know if I could, but I had the wig.
03:32 And it's been such a blessing.
03:34 All of the jobs I do, I do for the experience.
03:36 My working life is a journey, not a destination.
03:40 But with "Harry Potter",
03:41 the pleasure's come mostly afterwards.
03:43 I meet people for decades, I still meet them all the time,
03:45 who say that those films and those books
03:48 saved their life, not just changed their life,
03:50 but when they were suicidal, or when they were
03:51 in very dark places, or they felt alone,
03:53 or abused, or neglected, or whatever.
03:55 Those stories gave them hope.
03:57 And I get to be part of that with people,
03:59 which is extraordinary because, let's face it,
04:01 what do I do?
04:02 I dress up and put funny voices on.
04:04 But I still, I get to ride that tide,
04:06 which is a real privilege.
04:08 When I was in the room, Chris Columbus said,
04:09 "Would you mind reading for another part
04:11 "as Lucius Malfoy?"
04:13 And I thought to myself for a split second,
04:15 he wants me to play two parts,
04:17 God, he must think I'm good.
04:18 And then I realized I wasn't gonna get killed
04:20 with a log car.
04:21 And so I read for Lucius Malfoy rather resentfully
04:24 and bitterly, and I'm pretty sure that's why I got it.
04:27 - Delta or no Delta, that's a hard weapon.
04:29 You know, Bert, safety should be on at all times,
04:32 don't they?
04:33 - Well, it's my safety, sir.
04:34 - It was a big, noisy, hot, sweaty, very macho set.
04:42 There were no women around, a couple on the crew,
04:44 but mostly it was men.
04:45 There were a lot of men and boys being soldiers,
04:48 some of them thinking that they were soldiers.
04:50 The bit I remember most is when I went to train,
04:54 the Rangers went to train in Fort Benning with the Rangers,
04:57 and all the people who survived came to see us,
04:59 and the families of the dead came to see us.
05:01 And we felt that keen responsibility
05:02 to tell their story honestly.
05:05 And then when we were shooting in Morocco,
05:07 it was, we were all in this reclaimed medical dump
05:10 behind barbed wire, no food and drink for a long time
05:13 for a second, it was deeply uncomfortable.
05:15 I don't know if it was intentional
05:16 to make us feel uncomfortable,
05:17 but when we were shooting, there was some,
05:19 I'm sure it was safe, no one got injured,
05:21 but it felt dangerous.
05:22 My first shot, they go,
05:23 "Make your way down that street with the ammunite,
05:25 "and things are gonna blow up, and cars are gonna spin,
05:27 "and people will drop down dead,
05:28 "and then get behind a broken building and say your lines."
05:31 So I went, "Normally you would say,
05:34 "can I walk through and see it happen,
05:35 "but it was too expensive."
05:37 So I was making my way down the street,
05:38 things were flying over my head,
05:40 and things were blowing up next to me.
05:41 People were, snipers were shooting dust next to me,
05:43 but I didn't know it was dust, and things were exploding.
05:44 And I was going down the street,
05:46 terrified, and then when I got to the end,
05:50 and did my dialogue,
05:52 because I'd rehearsed a couple of times,
05:54 afterwards, one of the real Rangers who was watching went,
05:57 "You didn't have a magazine.
05:58 "When you fell over, the magazine dropped out
06:00 "of your thing, so there's nothing to find out.
06:01 "I think you were saying bang,
06:03 "when you pulled the trigger."
06:04 And I went, "Was I?"
06:05 He said, "Yeah, I think you were going bang, bang."
06:08 And I went to Ridley, and I went, "Ridley, I think,
06:10 "I don't know, it was a bit panicked,
06:11 "but right at the end, I think I was going bang, bang,
06:14 "when I pulled the trigger,
06:15 "because I didn't have a magazine."
06:18 - What I'm about to tell you, Corporal,
06:20 cannot leave this room.
06:21 Under no circumstances can you allow your co-talker
06:27 to fall into enemy hands.
06:29 - I needed my '01 visa to work in America renewed,
06:32 and so I have one scene in "Windtalkers,"
06:35 and I was gone by 11.30 in the morning, I think,
06:38 didn't even get my free lunch.
06:40 But when they made the trailer,
06:41 my one scene is all the story,
06:42 it's all the exposition with Nick Cage.
06:44 I brief him and tell him what's gonna happen.
06:48 And so the trailer is all me,
06:51 and my friends phone me up going,
06:53 "You said you were, you always do this."
06:55 I'm going, "No, I'm really not in the thing at all, barely."
06:58 But it was great being with John Woo for an hour,
07:02 I'm not sure he knew my name.
07:04 - Why are we running away from a skateboard?
07:07 - I think it's probably a bomb.
07:09 - (laughs) I thought you said bomb.
07:12 - Jackie is the only superstar I've ever worked with
07:14 who was more of a hero to me after I worked with him before.
07:18 He was just remarkable and hilarious and humble,
07:21 and there seemed to be five of him,
07:23 'cause he was always doing many, many things.
07:26 - I thanked Pam for cutting off my hand,
07:30 and for giving me this fine hook
07:33 for disemboweling and ripping throats.
07:37 - It's an odd thing Peter Pan movie,
07:39 because it's been a huge success since it was made,
07:41 but when it came out, it was a catastrophic flop,
07:43 'cause people thought, "Well, I've seen that before."
07:45 Actually, no one's ever made a film with Peter Pan before.
07:48 Jane Barrett's Peter Pan is about a little girl
07:50 who's told, "You're not a little girl, you're a woman now.
07:52 "It's time to grow up."
07:54 And those days, that meant, "Have a family, have sex,
07:57 "and leave your brother's bedroom, stop playing pirates."
08:00 So that night, she dreams and creates a world
08:02 where there's a little boy with baby teeth,
08:03 he'll always play with her.
08:05 But there's also a man who's strangely attractive,
08:08 but repulsive as well.
08:09 She's not ready to be attractive to men,
08:11 and he looks like the only man she knows,
08:12 which is her father.
08:13 That's a really potent Freudian story
08:16 about mortality and maturity, and no one ever made that.
08:20 They get obsessed with the boy for some reason.
08:22 He's a figment of her imagination.
08:24 And there's a reason why that film, still decades later,
08:28 has resonated with so many girls and so many young women
08:30 and so many adult women who say to me,
08:32 "That's actually my favorite film you've ever been in."
08:35 Because J.M. Barrie captured that horrifying moment
08:38 when, as a girl, you realize the world is looking at you
08:41 as a woman.
08:42 It's had the most profound effect on people around the world.
08:56 Tens of millions of people watched it and loved it.
08:57 People did the movements outside the headquarters.
09:00 They did it at Louvre, they did it outside Trump Tower
09:02 and stuff.
09:03 And I still, inside the industry and with journalists,
09:07 it's the thing they want to talk about most, always.
09:10 It's the most human script I've ever had
09:13 and one of the most interesting and moving jobs
09:16 I've ever had.
09:17 And I wasn't cast, I was a replacement.
09:19 And so they phoned me late at night.
09:21 They knew me from a short segment I'd done
09:24 in a film called "Nine Lives" years before.
09:27 And they said, "Do you like this thing?
09:28 "And if you like it, will you get on a plane immediately?
09:30 "You're shooting tomorrow in Grand Central Station."
09:32 And I'd never read anything like it.
09:34 And I arrived, and I first met Brit in character
09:38 at Grand Central Station.
09:39 And I mean, you knew doing it,
09:43 there was something special about it.
09:45 But when you meet people around the world,
09:46 it's the thing, you know, the other things they talk about
09:49 as if they enjoyed this pretense.
09:50 They enjoyed the play element, you know,
09:52 the let's dress up.
09:53 And the OA is real or feels real to an awful lot of people.
09:57 And they're desperate to see it finished.
10:00 So am I.
10:01 - Apparently the 133 jumps we've made filled in the gaps.
10:04 Extraordinarily fortunate coincidence.
10:06 - I grew up in a household where all we did was watch telly.
10:08 That was all we ever did.
10:09 We would eat, often in front of the television,
10:11 and we would cram into a little room,
10:13 and we would watch television.
10:14 And we would argue about what we would watch.
10:15 Everyone would argue.
10:16 Long time before the remote control,
10:17 so whoever would get to the television,
10:19 my brothers and I would fight over the button
10:21 that changed the channel.
10:22 But we never argued over Star Trek.
10:24 The whole family would watch Star Trek.
10:26 And the thought that I would ever have been,
10:29 and the feeling when I was standing,
10:31 commanding my own starship,
10:34 and hitting the warp drive, or transporting places,
10:38 or any of that, you know, sitting in the chair,
10:41 torpedoes coming in, doing that thing
10:43 of rocking for left and right, which, by the way,
10:45 we still do like they did in the '60s.
10:46 There's no clever way to do it.
10:48 It was incredible.
10:49 I had a fight coming up with Michelle Yeoh, a big fight.
10:51 She's Michelle Yeoh, and she moves like liquid.
10:53 She's such a beautiful person and a beautiful mover.
10:56 And I'm a tennis nut, and I played three five-set games
10:59 of tennis two days beforehand.
11:00 I woke up, my knees were the size of pumpkins.
11:03 And the stunt guy said, "You can't do the fight.
11:04 "I'm putting a double in."
11:05 And I went, "You can amputate my legs.
11:07 "I'm doing this fight, and I won't even tell you
11:09 "the things I had to do to make myself mobile."
11:12 - I won't take that as a compliment.
11:13 - Yeah, don't.
11:14 All right, what's a war hero got to do?
11:16 Got some lubrication around here.
11:17 I remember reading it thinking
11:19 they'd made a terrible mistake.
11:21 I mean, I've never done comedy publicly.
11:23 I make stupid jokes privately, but,
11:25 and I don't know Armando, he obviously meant to offer it
11:27 to Jason Statham or someone who's got the name wrong.
11:30 And it came in the notes, and it said,
11:31 "If you've got any questions, just phone me up and ask."
11:33 And I phoned up, and, "Would you like to do it?"
11:35 I said, "Yes, definitely, I'm in.
11:37 "Do you mind if I do it in a Yorkshire accent?"
11:40 And he went, "What, oh, well, do you think it's funny?"
11:44 I said, "I don't know, I read it.
11:45 "I heard Yorkshire in my head."
11:46 He went, "Sure."
11:48 And I don't know what I'd have done if he'd said no.
11:50 I think that the entrance, first of all,
11:53 the other characters have been on screen for an hour,
11:54 so it's time for a bit of new blood.
11:56 But they're all scared.
11:57 Everybody's scared of each other.
11:59 He's the only bloke who's not scared, isn't he?
12:00 So he arrived bullishly.
12:02 And it was a stroke of genius on Armando's part
12:04 to make it slow-mo, so all those medals jangled.
12:07 - Remember what it was like before we were rental sunder?
12:11 - So I love voice work, so I've done lots of animated movies
12:14 and loads of video games as well.
12:16 And I like it because you don't get cast
12:18 for what you look like, you get cast for anything,
12:20 like playing the Emperor in "The Dark Crystal."
12:23 The only thing about that is they'd shot
12:25 on these fantastic sets
12:26 with the world's greatest puppeteers for a year.
12:28 And they'd done the voices,
12:30 and they'd moved the puppets according to it.
12:32 So none of us were free to give our own performances.
12:34 We gave the performance, we were mimicking the puppeteers.
12:37 And unfortunately, the puppeteers lost,
12:39 screaming as the Emperor.
12:40 So there wasn't one session I did
12:42 where I didn't lose my voice.
12:43 - Bipolar disorder, depression, mania, ADHD,
12:47 possible schizoaffective disorder.
12:49 - None of that is psychopathy.
12:51 You don't know what you're talking about.
12:52 - This is a film, such a beautiful film,
12:55 about the power of forgiveness,
12:57 how necessary it is,
12:58 and how carrying hate only poisons you.
13:02 Doesn't in any way affect the things
13:03 you think you'd like to affect.
13:05 And it's not disguised,
13:07 but it's delivered through this extraordinary concoction
13:11 of people in a, I don't know,
13:14 it was the most intense filming experience I've ever had.
13:16 And I felt it when I've seen an audience.
13:18 It's for many people,
13:20 most intense experience they've ever had.
13:22 But it's uplifting.
13:23 So I think a lot of people were worried,
13:26 cautious about approaching it
13:27 because they thought it was gonna be depressing.
13:29 But actually, there's something incredibly spiritual
13:32 about how these people are,
13:34 it's not a simplistic ending,
13:36 but the power of forgiveness is writ large in them.
13:39 And I've never seen it without an audience
13:42 being in floods of tears at the end.
13:43 - Ha!
13:44 - In the name of the Father, the Son,
13:45 and the Holy Weekend Box Office.
13:46 - Everybody in the world wanted to be him or be with him.
13:50 But who he was off screen was so damaged,
13:53 and so unlike that, so I didn't give interviews.
13:56 And so angry so often, or angry at himself,
13:59 and destroyed relationships all around him.
14:01 And that stuff I kind of recognized,
14:03 particularly the code switching.
14:06 He was someone different with everyone he was with.
14:07 Certainly when he was young, he was so desperate,
14:09 so hungry, literally physically hungry.
14:11 He'd have done anything to survive.
14:13 And he created this character to survive, and it worked.
14:16 He wanted love.
14:17 So he created this character that the world loved,
14:20 and he created him so well
14:21 that the whole world loved him for decades.
14:23 I got a recording, an illicit recording,
14:24 and one interview he gave that wasn't meant to be recorded,
14:27 and someone's held onto for 40 years.
14:29 Never played to anyone, because out of respect to him,
14:31 he played it to me.
14:33 And I heard the man, not the icon.
14:35 And you do all the outside stuff, you know.
14:38 There's the voice, and there's the walk,
14:40 and the tan, and the face, and all the clothes.
14:43 Actually, having done all that stuff,
14:45 you've got to throw it away.
14:47 I'm in the scenes with this brilliant actress,
14:48 Laura Aikman, she's playing Diane Cannon,
14:50 and we're not trying to recreate something from 1960,
14:52 we're doing something in 2022
14:55 in a factory in Liverpool next to an open sewage farm.
14:57 And so, for all the work and background stuff you do,
15:02 when audiences are watching,
15:04 they just want something real to be happening
15:05 in front of them, something spontaneous.
15:07 (dramatic music)