Case Histories: Jason Isaacs interview

Jason Isaacs can no longer hide behind Lucius Malfoy’s wig. But is this ‘shy’ actor ready to become US TV’s Next Big Brit?

When I first see Jason Isaacs he’s freeing a little girl who’s been tied up in a trailer. We’re at Fox Studios, where Isaacs is filming a television pilot that was at that time called R.E.M but has since changed its name toAwake. It’s set in multiple realities, yet is better written and more graspable than last year’s high-concept Leonardo DiCaprio film,Inception. There’s a lot of buzz about the show, particularly about Isaacs’s performance as the reality surfing police detective hero.

We break for lunch and stand in line outside, where a hot buffet has been set up. A couple of crew members arrive at the same time, Isaacs insists they go first. He’s super polite, empathetic and gracious at all times – perhaps to an absurd degree. He’s speaking in an American accent most of the time, not wanting to unnerve the crew by speaking in his native English accent. But he also doesn’t want to unnerve me by speaking in American.

Awake is the brainchild of Kyle Killen, whose forthcoming film, The Beaver, will attempt to revive the career of Isaacs’s former co-star Mel Gibson, and it’s produced by one of the team behind 24. Yet Isaacs shrugs that the pilot – a one-off episode made to test audience reaction – may never be made into a series. Self-deprecating to a fault, he says that it’s probably destined for what he calls “the U-bend of scripts”.

“Every pilot that’s made comes from some people with amazing prestige,” he says. “They’re all a big word thrown around town and they’re everybody’s favourite project and then no one ever mentions them again. Lots of fabulously talented people, and the head of the network chooses only one. But do I want to move here? Do I want to put my kids in school here? Is that what I really want?”

Isaacs, who lives in north west London with his wife Emma and their two daughters, has been in this situation before. His role in the crime dramaBrotherhood won him many fans in Hollywood, and last year, after a two-year courtship, he fielded eight offers from US networks. The show he eventually signed up for, Pleading Guilty, went no further. Then another bidding war erupted this year and Isaacs signed on for Awake, both as star and producer. Despite his fears (or are they hopes?) Isaacs was wrong about Awake – it will be shown this autumn, and is already one of the most highly anticipated new series on the schedule. Isaacs seems destined to become the biggest British export to American television since Hugh Laurie. But what happens if the BBC wants a second series of his new, Edinburgh-set series Case Histories? Then he really will be working in a parallel reality.

Case Histories, based on the books by Kate Atkinson, has Isaacs playing a detective, Jackson Brodie, a former cop and former soldier who is hard and soft in equal parts; sentimental, bewildered, sharp. It demonstrates that Isaacs is ready to be a fully fledged hero. No longer the rugged sidekick or the evil villain (The Patriot, Hook, Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter).

Those who saw the 2008 independent film Good would have seen Isaacs as the Jewish best friend of the man who can’t quite make up his mind about the Nazis. Isaacs gave a moving performance, but best-friend roles are probably a thing of the past. Now Isaacs has moved to a new level of alpha male heart-throb.

Brodie is complicated, tough and vulnerable. It’s an appealing mix. “There is nothing nicer than playing someone who is cooler, tougher, more virtuous and sexier than yourself and thinking, ‘I can be anyone’,” says Isaacs. “He is a fantasy version of myself. He will save any damsel in distress.” I’m not sure that he’s exactly a total fantasy version. They are probably more similar than he would admit.

In Case Histories he looks amazingly fit and manages to appear naked quite a lot. I tell him that he looks 10 years younger than the last time I saw him (he’s 47) which was at Heathrow when we both went to grab identical battered computers from the security scanner. “I would love to tell you I’ve found the secret to eternal youth. I go to the gym and avoid too many chips. I love to eat, hate to work out, but if you can’t count all your ribs from a distance you’re considered obese. I got into shape because I took kick-boxing lessons every day to prepare for a fight scene with Taylor Lautner (in the forthcoming film Abduction). I really wanted to lie down and eat Chinese food, but I kick-boxed every morning and ran. If someone was filming you with your kit off, you’d do the same thing.”

Isaacs points out that Atkinson’s books sell predominantly to women, because they’re crime fiction that’s “rich on character, light on plot. The characters are so rich and beautifully drawn. I hope the public like it.” There is nothing not to like. But Isaacs is, of course, the last to concede that.

What does he make of the reports that last year he was the most in-demand actor on the market? “I don’t know why but there was a sort of tulip fever. It’s certainly not a meritocracy because I have spectacularly talented friends. For some reason when I was available to do pilots again because Harry Potter came to an end, there was a kind of run on me and

I got offered tons of them.” He says all of this very quickly as if he’s diminishing the Isaacs rush.

“Perhaps I didn’t want to be the guy that’s crime fighting every week, the guy who wears blue suits and sunglasses. I aspire to more than that in my working life. I want to tell stories in an interesting way, so I said no to all of them. I can’t pretend that it wasn’t an ego boost to be desired in that way.”

He was just about to leave for the UK when he was asked to lunch by his agents and managers. “I thought it was going to be that nauseating thing where they sit around and tell you how great you are,” he says. “It turned out to be an intervention.They said if you continue to turn down these offers you’ll become a joke. My American agent said, ‘you’re passing yourself out of a career.’”

So he did a pilot in Chicago. “It was never seen by anybody except my agent and my mum. I was ambivalent about moving to Chicago.” He is less ambivalent about moving to LA. He does not want to commute.

“I don’t want to miss any more school plays. I don’t want my kids to go skiing for the first time without me. My kids don’t give a f--- what I’m doing. It’s me that doesn’t want to miss anything. I hate to sound like a Pringle-wearing suburbanite, but that’s where I’m happiest.”

Isaacs has always insisted he doesn’t need excitement in his personal life; that he can explore extremes in his acting. (Although you get the impression that it’s a very fine balance.) His wife Emma used to make documentaries, mostly for television.

“She stopped working when the kids came [Lily and Ruby]. Our youngest is five and she’s ready to work again. I loved making the Potters, 95 per cent because they were the Potters, and five per cent because they were in England and I got to sleep in my own bed. The studios make a dozen movies a year and most of them are about giant comic book super heroes and made for teenagers. With independent films it’s always kick, bo----ks, scramble, and fear that no one will ever see it.”

Case Histories instantly appealed to him since he’d already heard them as audio books. He loves Brodie because he’s a sentimental tough guy: “He’s a walking contradiction, but I loved that about him.” Brodie gets beaten up a lot. “That’s the other thing I love. He’s supposed to be this tough guy and he’s constantly getting smacked around by other people.”

It’s a complete contrast to the high-concept fantasy of Awake, which has Isaacs constantly trying to figure out if his life is real or a dream. He’s wearing a green elastic band around his wrist because in the show he changes the elastic band whenever he wakes up, whenever he moves from one reality to another. In one reality his wife was killed in a car crash and in another she lives and his son is killed instead. In both realities, he sees a therapist. Does Isaacs see a therapist?

“No, this is my catharsis. Who wouldn’t want to behave like an eight year-old, go out with homicide detectives to extraordinary places without taking the risks that they do. I get to shout, laugh and to explore what it’s like to be jealous, adored, terrified. I get to experience this range of things throughout the day and it really gets it out of your system. A lot of people live their life wishing it could be extreme. For instance, how many people who are in a long-term relationship don’t wonder what it’s like to be single again? I get to explore his choices. I’m not sure how useful it is in my professional life in terms of the audience’s ability to suspend disbelief if they know too many details of my life.”

Isaacs is articulate, analytical, charismatic and clever yet weirdly he strives to be anonymous – to blend in, not stand out. He favours wearing a uniform of dark blue jeans and black T-shirt. He even likes his accent to sound anonymous, to fit in anywhere. That comes from growing up feeling completely uncomfortable.

“I like figuring out characters, exploring what they’re about and what, from your [own] life, you can use to create human beings. I like hanging out with detectives, priests, soldiers. I get to imagine what my life would be like if I were them. I think I like this because I never felt I was part of anything. I never felt I belonged somewhere. I was never comfortable in any moment, and that’s not true any more.

“I liked sports but I was small and scrawny and never as good as my brothers [three of them]. I was never on teams that score and I was never in the school play. I never felt that I belonged to any group until the moment I started acting and I immediately fell in love with the process and I had instant girlfriends.

“I could talk to girls at parties about things that were honest and real and it made you close to them and I felt like I belonged in a group for whatever period of time we were doing it together.”

He did a law degree at Bristol because he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do: “I liked to argue. It was the one expertise that I had.” And that’s where he started doing plays and then went on to drama school.

Born in Liverpool, Isaacs moved to London aged 11. “I was very self-conscious about my accent and being smaller than my peers so I developed a lot of things you could do by yourself. I was very good at origami. When I moved to London everyone took notice of me because of my accent and I freaked out. I was self-conscious enough so I went instantly very cockney and stayed that way all the way through university where I was surrounded by people who sounded like Hugh Grant.”

Isaacs soon found himself mimicing them, and now, “depending on who I’m talking to, I can sound like them”. Being a chameleon, hiding, being natural, is of course partly because it’s a better tool as an actor but also it’s about still being self-conscious.

“I find myself as fascinating as most egomaniacs but I don’t think people should know. In the past people were always talking about my relationship with Emma. When were we going to get married? I didn’t even want people to know if I was straight or gay. I’m shy.

“There are lots of people that walk around this town that are so sexy and charismatic and if they can bottle it and get it on screen that’s what they do. I come from a different school.”

Sometimes he tries to make himself sound as boring as possible. “I don’t go out to films very much. People with kids don’t go out. They stay home, watch television and have dinner with friends.”

He says his mother was a Samaritan, a very smart and giving woman who was forever starting up charities and who always had people over for dinner “who had been trying to kill themselves”. His mother must have passed on the empathy gene. I’ve seen many actors on set really just caring about how their make-up looked, how their performance went. That seems the last thing on his mind. He seems to want to make his assistant happy, and to please the chef who made him his special kale.

“I think I channel those things in a slightly selfish way for my career but I learnt from her that doing things for others is the surest way to satisfaction. It can’t fill the hole just doing things for your family.” Does he have a hole? “I don’t know many people in this business, certainly not decent ones, who aren’t trying to fill an unfillable hole in some way.”

That said, nothing in acting gives him the same pleasure as being a good father. “I don’t do it for them, I do it for me. I’ve done all kinds of things that have given me personal pleasure, and they don’t touch the foothills of what it’s like to hold my children.” He waited a long time to have them. “I did, and I was travelling a lot and too f----- up to have kids. But they came at the right time. I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood. Emma asked me are you ready for this? She thinks I want to stay in California so I can dress like a teenager until I die.”

There’s something in him that always wants to behave like a teenager. A man who’s going to drive a golf cart back to the set has come for Isaacs, who insists that I sit in the passenger seat while he climbs on top. The driver is looking worried. And when we feel the plastic roof substantially bending because Isaacs is standing on top of it, the driver pales in fear. Isaacs jumps off, only because he doesn’t want to worry the driver and because he’s already convinced me he’s more than capable of doing his own stunts.

When the day wraps we finish up in his trailer. He regales me with wonderful, sadly unrepeatable stories from other movie sets. He’s never boastful, so much so that it’s sometimes hard to grasp all the big movies and all the big names he’s worked with: Mel Gibson, Charlize Theron, Matt Damon, Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore, Keanu Reeves…

When he tells (sadly unprintable) stories of people he’s worked with he’s very flamboyant, always putting on the perfect accent and for one anecdote about an actor that kept on trying to push him out of the shot, he mimes the whole scene.

It’s hard to imagine any awkwardness or discomfort in him, but that must have existed in a parallel universe. I try again to tell him that in this reality he seems to have the world at his feet. “I love the faith you have in this pilot,” he says. (I have hours of tape of him telling me it will never be made.) “And even if it does go out, if it goes opposite American Idol it doesn’t matter if you make the greatest television series ever made, no one will watch.” It seems no matter how good things are for Isaacs, he’s never going to believe it.