Jason Isaacs

Jason Isaacs joins Brent Spiner and Jonny Frakes on Dropping Names, and he arrives doing card tricks, admits he screenshotted every stranger online who complained about his North Carolina accent in The White Lotus, and confesses he was not the first choice for Timothy Ratliff. He was not the first choice for The Patriot either. That part came to him only because Jude Law stepped aside, and Isaacs walked into the room with a swagger he got from a rental car upgrade at LAX, then talked Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin into rewriting his villain until Colonel Tavington was burning churches and shooting children. Seven months in Thailand with the White Lotus cast gets described as part Lord of the Flies, part Mean Girls, and Isaacs is clear that the worst behaviour on any set is never the actors.

There is a lot more here for anyone who knows him as Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter, as Captain Hook in P J Hogan's Peter Pan, as Michael Burnham's Captain Lorca on Star Trek Discovery, or as Hap in The OA. He explains why Peter Pan flopped and then quietly became a family staple, why he went to Hollywood jail after it, and how the OA job came to him at midnight after a Hungarian poet did not work out. He talks about being blown off the screen by Saoirse Ronan on Stockholm, Pennsylvania while she was also shooting Brooklyn, about doing Pinter's The Dumb Waiter with Lee Evans, about the West Wing set where a semicolon was a semicolon and Janel Moloney gave him a freebie, about getting sober while Stanley Kubrick was still lighting Eyes Wide Shut down the hall at Pinewood, and about growing up in a Jewish community in Liverpool before the law degree that lasted two weeks. Brent and Jonny also get him going on why the famous people nodding at him now will stop nodding next year.

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