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He has worked in the industry for more than three decades, and appeared in blockbusters, but for a long time Jason Isaacs had managed to eschew the limelight.
Then came The White Lotus, and suddenly the 61-year-old Liverpudlian became an internet sensation. He presented an award at the Brits, and was part of ITV’s Oscars coverage last month, bemusing viewers with his refreshing honesty. “Whoever at ITV decided to get Jason Isaacs as part of their coverage is a genius,” one fan commented.
The intensity of the spotlight has surprised even Isaacs himself, who called it “completely bizarre”. With each of his comments comes a new headline: “Jason Isaacs reveals lost friendships among White Lotus Cast”; “Jason Isaacs calls out double standard for men after prosthetic penis debate” – and shortly after – “Jason Isaacs is sorry about those vulva comments”. “I made a joke about Meryl Streep playing me in a TV series and suddenly it’s been picked up by a hundred thousand websites as if it was a genuine suggestion!” the actor said recently.
Isaacs plays the southern American patriarch Timothy Ratliff in the third season of The White Lotus, Mike White’s Emmy-winning anthology about the psychosocial dysfunctions of guests and staff at a luxury hotel chain. Holidaying in Thailand with his maladjusted family, Ratliff discovers the FBI has raided his office due to his shady business dealings. Cue his agonising psychological breakdown as he pops his wife’s (Parker Posey) lorazepam and fantasises about killing himself with a stolen gun.
Isaacs’ versatility can be traced back to his youth. Born in Liverpool, the third of four sons in a tight-knit Jewish family, he found himself moving through different sociocultural environments – and often adopting the accents of those around him. After moving to London, he attended what was then Haberdashers’ Aske’s boys’ school (alongside David Baddiel, Sacha Baron Cohen and Matt Lucas) before going to the University of Bristol and drama school, where “everyone sounded like Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley”.
His career began on television (Capital City, Civvies, Dangerous Lady) and on the stage, where he played the gay Jewish office temp Louis Ironson in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the National Theatre, opposite Daniel Craig. “Jason already had the makings of a really extraordinary actor,” the play’s director, Declan Donnellan told the Guardian this week. “His presence was always electric, and his tremendous vitality enabled him to live in the moment with extraordinary spontaneity.”
Isaacs landed his first big Hollywood feature film role alongside Laurence Fishburne in the 1997 horror film Event Horizon. After that, he appeared in the Bruce Willis blockbuster Armageddon (1998) as a planet-saving scientist. Despite initially being called upon to play one of the film’s young astronauts, Isaacs chose to honour a previous commitment to Divorcing Jack, the comedy-thriller he was making with David Thewlis. “They go, ‘Jason, you have to understand something: this is a Bruce Willis project. I went, ‘Well, you know, this is a David Thewlis project’,” he recalled.
This desire to take on roles that interest him over the most obvious ones has become something of a modus operandi. “I’ve been to Sundance with eight films, and only one of them came out,” he said in 2018. Christopher Anthony, the writer and director of the upcoming indie film Heavyweight, which features Isaacs as a boxing promoter, said “having an actor of Jason’s calibre still willing to do a film for the love of the craft and the writing on the page” was a gift to the whole industry.
Isaac’s big-screen breakthrough came a few years after Armageddon in Roland Emmerich’s revolutionary war drama The Patriot, where his turn as the villainous British colonel who kills Mel Gibson’s character’s son made him a go-to bad guy for casting directors. He went on to join the Harry Potter cinematic universe as Lucius Malfoy and played the dual roles of Captain Hook and Mr Darling in Universal’s Peter Pan movie.
After Peter Pan bombed Isaacs returned to TV, playing the lead in the Showtime series Brotherhood, and receiving his first Golden Globe nomination for the BBC’s The State Within. There was also Netflix’s The OA and Paramount+’s Star Trek: Discovery. It was his small-screen performances that led to him being cast as Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov in Armando Iannucci’s 2017 political satire, The Death of Stalin.
“I first remember seeing Jason in Brotherhood, and I had no idea he was English – his character felt so real,” Iannucci said. Though the writer had Isaacs down “as a gangland leader in 90s America”, he was pleasantly surprised to find him funny too. “You can come across the most brilliant actor in the world and give them some comedy to do and they freeze. Whereas Jason has that innate ability. He could improvise, stay in character, and came up with 101 different suggestions.”
The actor has also charmed people with his dad-like posts on Instagram, where he shares behind-the-scenes photos of the cast like a family vacation album. And his onscreen sons in The White Lotus have paid tribute to his fatherly manner during filming. Patrick Schwarzenegger, who plays Saxon, said Isaacs “became a mentor and quite literally a father figure for me … he helped me work through scenes when I felt stuck and he spent a lot of time building the father relationship to us kids”.
And Sam Nivola, who plays younger son Lochlan, called Isaacs “an exemplary actor and role model” and “truly family”. “He was our imaginary family’s glue, always funny, never took himself too seriously despite his inspiring and infectious talent, and was always a generous and caring scene partner,” Nivola said. “He made me feel supported at my lowest, but wasn’t scared of busting my balls at my highest!”
Ahead of its finale on Sunday, the internet is awash with speculation about how season three of The White Lotus will end. A lot of it revolves around Ratliff: that he will be shot by a member of his own family; that he will find spiritual enlightenment. It is presumed the series, which has become renowned for reviving actors’ careers – Jennifer Coolidge has spoken often about her newfound fame after the first two seasons – will finally cement Isaacs’ place in the spotlight.
But whether the actor wants that is another question. As he told Vanity Fair recently: “I like to be out in the world amongst people, and – this sounds perverse – I don’t like being looked at. Certainly as myself.”
