The star of the BBC's Case Histories on being a reluctant sex symbol, his need to help people ? and how he hopes Mel Gibson will find some peace
'I am not a sex symbol," says Jason Isaacs, fixing me with those dreamy blue eyes. Well, that's not what everybody else is saying. The Observer's Euan Ferguson wrote that Isaacs has "won his promotion to officially approved national lust object". He's apparently right up there with Colin Firth and Daniel Craig, thanks to his performance as soulful, damaged and yet stirringly buff private detective Jackson Brodie in BBC1's Case Histories, which concludes tonight.
Think of that moment in last night's episode when Brodie woke up in his hospital bed scarred, amnesiac and yet pleasingly barrel-chested after trying to drag a collapsed old lady out of her car that had crashed on to the Aberdeen-Edinburgh main line. You can stop now.
Grazia also named him last week as a lust object, while Twitter is heaving with eulogies to his performances in the TV adaptation of Kate Atkinson's novels (check out #casehistories). He was 24th sexiest male movie star in Empire magazine's poll (bet it ate him up he wasn't 23rd). But that was in 2009. If they did that poll today, doubtless he'd be in the top 10, eclipsing Alan Rickman if not Johnny Depp.
Colin Firth had that moment as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice when he emerged damp from his lake. Daniel Craig as Bond emerged captivatingly from the sea. Now Isaacs has his moment in Case Histories, washing himself bare-chested at Natasha Little's bathroom sink after kindly digging a grave for a neighbour's dog.
"Look," says Isaacs. (I love it when interviewees, mostly politicians, start sentences with "Look" ? it heralds a doomed rhetorical attempt to lead the interviewer back to supposed common sense). "I'm still spending my working life trying to mine people's souls and now they're complimenting me in reviews on the amount of time I spend in the gym. On the definition of my triceps." His triceps are defined? "Let's not do this. I can't plug Virgin Active in every interview I do. I can do it for the daytime TV sofas, but not for G2."
Outwardly, I'm smiling, but inwardly I'm deleting questions. What's it like to be buff? Who would win in a pecs-off between him and Craig? How, practically, would a pecs-off work? Is he as buff as the Action Man dolls of him in leading acting roles that his disturbing fans have put up at jasonisaacsonline.com? Etc.
"Anyway, I don't have that body any more. I damaged my Achilles tendon, so I can't run." Righto. "And that whole sex symbol nonsense ? what better way to undercut it than by Jackson wearing a bright red gnome suit that looks as though it came from Primark?" Good question, but the answer is: even in that red-hoodie-trackie-bottoms disaster, he still looks hotter than July.
But really, Isaacs is not the new messiah of TV lust. He's a very naughty boy. He has come into this cafe near his north-west London home with a chai latte from another joint and, pathetically, tried to hide it under the table from the waitress. "But you don't do chai lattes, do you?" he asks sweetly when he's found out, fixing her with the aforementioned eyes. Placated, she offers him tap water. If I'd pulled that stunt, I'd have been thrown out, possibly duffed up. But I am one of those ? how was it Ferguson described men who aren't Jason Isaacs? Ah yes ? "earthbound homunculi".
Back to "mining souls". What does that mean? "Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition. That's what I'm doing with Jackson." He has a point. His appeal (mostly to women) as Jackson Brodie is not proportional to his workout regime. He's mined deeper than that. I suggest to Isaacs that Brodie is a latter-day Rochester, a wounded beast whom wannabe Jane Eyres imagine nursing.
"I think he's the opposite of Rochester," says Isaacs, who once turned down that role. But surely there's something in the comparison. Even though Jackson is forbiddingly butch, he frequently gets beaten up or comes off second best in train crashes, and so finds himself being dabbed by appealing women. In last night and tonight's two-parter, he hobbles in the footsteps of the adorable, savvy yet broken 16-year-old Reggie, one of those lost girls with whom he always gets entangled. Yes, Jackson's butch and macho, but in terms of narrative focus he's displaced by strong women, symbolically castrated even.
"Kate's right when she says he's more of a woman than a man," he says. "Women respond well to Jackson Brodie because he's none of the things he appears to be. He seems to be a butch, hard-bitten detective. He's a man with huge damage in his past. He's sentimental, he can't say no to cases he should run a mile from, he picks up lost girls."
The damage: sister Niamh's body dragged from the canal, again and again in unbearable repeat; his daughter Skyping from the other side of the world and sounding as though she's having a great time with his ex's new man. The sentiment: Jackson's devotion to the gin-soaked, crying-time wing of country and western. All that Iris DeMent, Mary Gauthier and Lucinda Williams.
"Kate's novels, which I listened to as audiobooks long before I got this part, are all about how we escape the damage of the past," Isaacs says. Atkinson's crime novels are unusual for being more concerned with redeeming the damaged than plot. In an online interview with Isaacs, Atkinson stresses something else: how much she wants to honour crime's victims. "That's why Jackson is not interested in forensics. He's interested in finding the closure for others he'll never get. Jackson wants to help. He has love to give."
Is there anything of Isaacs in Jackson Brodie? "There was one scene," he says, not quite welling up, but not far from it. "We did two takes. It's when I'm telling my daughter that she should go to her new life in New Zealand. It was tough saying goodbye to her. When we shot the first take I was crying my eyes out. The director Bill Anderson said: 'Can we do that again ? with you as Jackson? He's supposed to be from Yorkshire.'"
So Isaacs was imagining losing a daughter? (He has two ? Lily, nine, and Ruby, five, with his partner, documentary-maker Emma Hewitt.) "Yeah. You do anything you can to trick your imagination so that you feel the things your character is feeling. Emma once made a brilliant documentary following a prostitute in Leeds. The woman wore a mental mask so it wasn't her getting fucked. Actors similarly try to trick themselves into a performance."
Isaacs stops for a moment. He's wearing the same black T-shirt/blue jeans outfit he wore when the Guardian last interviewed him, three years ago. "God, I hate interviews with actors poncing on. Who wants to know about their lives? I don't want to know about Al Pacino's life. I just want to watch Dog Day Afternoon and think he's gay."
But back to Lily, Ruby and Emma. In a few weeks' time, Isaacs is moving with them to LA so he can start work on the first series of Awake, an NBC show that's garnered much buzz since its pilot was screened. Isn't that bad timing, given that he's now the new Colin Firth? This is his moment when he becomes more than sidekick or gnarled nemesis (think his sadistic British army officer opposite Mel Gibson in The Patriot, his turn as Captain Hook or, most notably, his performances as the blond barmcake Lucius Malfoy of the Harry Potter franchise). He was talented foil, now he's national crumpet. Why leave now?
"I can always come back and I will because I know Kate's bursting with ideas, so I'm sure there will be a second series of Case Histories. If anybody else took that part I would track them down and strip the skin off them."
Perhaps emigrating to LA makes sense. There's a buzz about Awake. Fingers crossed, it'll make him the biggest British export to US TV since Hugh Laurie. Isaacs plays a reality-surfing detective who isn't sure if his life is real or dream. In one reality, his wife dies in a car crash; in another, his son dies instead.
Isaacs worries: "There's a risk Awake is too high-concept for US networks. The US shows I love ? Mad Men, Sopranos ? would never work on network TV. This has to work on network TV, like House or CSI. And I've got producer credit. Lots of shows get canned mid-series because they didn't sell to middle America.
"If it flops, I'll live with it. I don't want to be in crap. Mind you, Brotherhood [the 2006 Rhode Island-set series in which he played an Irish-American mobster] was critically praised and nobody watched it. I hanker for something that gets a critical mauling but's enormously successful." Then he could become a household name? "I'm never going to be a household name. I like being anonymous."
He sips his drink of shame. "When I came back from filming Abduction [a film to be released in September], I told my agent: I'm staying in London now. If it takes doing children's theatre from the back of a van in Kilburn, that's OK. I need to be with my family. My job is to keep the family together and provide for them." He doesn't want to be Skyping his daughter on the other side of the world, like Jackson Brodie winds up doing? "I've done that and it's not something I want to repeat. That's why we're all going."
On the subject of Mel Gibson, what does he feels about his former co-star's antisemitic rant, made while drunk at the wheel of his car to a Jewish cop? "He's a very tender, troubled man whose rightwing politics I could never share. I still think of him on the set of The Patriot smoking a fag and telling some hysterically gynaecological gag and then turning round and accessing huge wells of emotion as he holds his son Heath Ledger's dead body.
"The night of that rant he had come from a Jewish friend of mine who has an orthodox Jewish wife and had taken a gift for them ? that got lost in the headlines." Yeah, but . . . "I know, I know! I heard the tapes and I can't make excuses. That said he will be enormously troubled about what he heard on those tapes. We all know people who when they're drunk want to get people to hit them and that's part of what he did."
A few months after the tapes of Gibson's rant were released, he and Isaacs met at a public event. "He came up to me, so I said: 'Rabbi Gibson!' And he said: 'Give me a break ? I was drunk.' I hope he finds peace."
This is a nuanced but unexpectedly forgiving attitude from a Jew who's experienced more than his fair share of antisemitism. "You try getting baited by antisemites in Liverpool and London," Isaacs says.
He was born in Liverpool 48 years ago to fourth-generation Jewish scousers. How come his parents moved to Israel? "It was always their dream." Isaacs found out the full grim truth of why his parents wanted to leave Britain only last week. "My dad was very ill so I went to sit by his bedside in intensive care with my brothers. We thought he was dying, but he's recovered now, thank God.
"In the wee small hours of the night when I was holding his hand, we had conversations about his childhood and they made it clearer why he hung on to this dream of moving to Israel. It wasn't only that he'd been engaging with the blackshirts of the Nazi movement when he was 11 or 12. It wasn't only that aged 13 he discovered there'd been a holocaust a few hundred miles away. He said it was also because there was still a Nazi movement here after the war.
"I said to him: 'Dad, the timescale's mixed up. You mean after the war, there were Nazis in Liverpool?' And he said: 'Absolutely.'"
Isaacs's father was speaking of the riots in Liverpool and other British cities in 1947 after the hangings of two British soldiers in Mandate Palestine by Irgun militants. It's a historical moment recently dramatised in Peter Kosminsky's fine Channel 4 drama series The Promise, which Isaacs confesses shamefacedly not to have seen.
"After the hangings, my dad was cowering with his family in his flat in Liverpool while people were breaking windows and shouting: 'Burn the Jews! Burn the Jews!' I thought he was confused, but he wasn't: these things were happening to him after the war when he was 16.
"So to discover that a country had been set up where this wouldn't happen to you, where there wouldn't have been a chance of you being carted off and put in gas ovens, moved him and my mother all the way through raising their children. They left when their fourth son was at university." Did he ever imagine joining them? "I imagined, but didn't want to go."
Aged 11, Isaacs moved with his family from Liverpool to London, later attending Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, whose alumni include David Baddiel, Matt Lucas and Sacha Baron Cohen. "I remember not having friends and spending a lot of time stoned in the grounds." That's not how one contemporary and friend, film critic Mark Kermode, remembers him. "I know," says Isaacs. "When I read his book, I thought, he's got me wrong ? he saw me as cool and successful. I guess what he saw was a level of braggadocio from me that must have been intimidating. But I was compensating for feeling isolated. Even in my tightly knit Jewish community I didn't fit in.
"Other people there felt at ease with themselves ? I felt this dis-ease." He only started to feel he belonged when, during his law degree at Bristol, he got into acting. "I found a camaraderie. For all my contemporaries, the appeal was to fathom out what kind of childhoods they had, to find what's in the soul.
"Now I have no such dis-ease. I found someone who loves me and I have children and so a place in the world. It's enough. Not for everyone. Lots of actors, I've seen them, suffer the effects of being treated like a deity, how being absolutely empowered absolutely corrupts." At this moment, Isaacs's PR minder arrives and brazenly hands Isaacs another out-of-cafe chai latte. Shocking how actors get treated like deities.
"As an actor I've never wanted that treatment. I always wanted to help." He reminds me of his performance in the 1993 National Theatre production of Tony Kushner's play Angels in which he played gay Jewish office temp Louis Ironson ? a man who can't bear to face his lover dying of Aids. "I still get letters, one from a woman whose sister died of cancer saying: 'I remember how it was when you left your boyfriend in Angels.' I like it when someone tells me a performance helped."
It's easy to be sceptical about this: acting isn't exactly a caring profession. But it's in part what moves Isaacs as a performer: "I think this show I'm going to do, Awake, if it's done well, will not only be provocative and entertaining, but help people. I want to do that." There's more of Jason Isaacs in Jackson Brodie than you'd think.
? The name of a downloading website has been removed pending investigation.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jun/19/jason-isaacs-i-like-being-anonymous
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