Interview: Jason Isaacs on the Water Cooler Element of ‘The White Lotus’ and the Genius of Mike White [VIDEO]
In the world of acting, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone as curious, charismatic, and versatile as Jason Isaacs. Across his 35-year-and-counting screen career, Isaacs has built a domineering presence on the big screen, from memorable supporting roles in genre hits like Event Horizon and Independence Day, to iconic villains such as Colonel Tavington in The Patriot, Captain Hook in the definitive 2003 adaptation of Peter Pan, and the endlessly fashionable Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. The pinnacle of Isaacs’ film work to date, however, came in the form of 2021’s Mass, an intimate drama, where his work as the grieving and furious father of a school shooting victim was rightfully met with uproarious approval and calls for an Oscar nomination that sadly never arrived.
It’s on the small screen, however, that Isaacs has consistently delivered some of his most fascinating and layered work. Showtime’s Brotherhood, which paired Isaacs with the Australian phenom Jason Clarke as two Boston brothers on opposite sides of the law, provided Isaacs with a platform as a leading man, able to flex his charisma, while also allowing him to create a richly layered portrait of a violent criminal whose simultaneous ironclad loyalty to his family made for a show ahead of its time. And that’s not the first time Isaacs has been on the cutting edge of television, just look at the prematurely canceled Awake and Netflix’s The OA. Now, Isaacs is back in the world of prestige TV for the third season of Mike White’s hot social satire The White Lotus, portraying Timothy Ratliff, a financier whose career mistakes send him into suicidal despair while vacationing with his wife (Parker Posey) and children (Sarah Catherine Hook, Sam Nivola, and Patrick Schwarzenegger).
The latest season of The White Lotus has – arguably more so than in previous years – been met with an explosion of internet buzz, from Walton Goggins’ performance as a vengeful son, to Sam Rockwell’s now-notorious four-minute monologue in a bar, to Isaacs himself, who found himself taken aback by the deluge of internet discussions that this season has sparked as he sat down for what is now our third conversation together. “Granted, I’m inside the bubble, and I’ve been doing the publicity for what seems like my entire life now,” said Isaacs, “but nonetheless, the scale of it has staggered all of us involved. What’s been interesting is the young people who found this to be a new phenomenon, where you can discuss a show for a week and talk about it online or in real life. It’s only since streaming that [discussion] stopped happening. The fictitious water cooler conversation that you hear about; it doesn’t really happen anymore, but it did happen with White Lotus. You go to coffee shops, people are talking about it; people are talking about it in Facebook groups dedicated to the show. The last time something like that happened, I was a teenager, and it was about who shot JR in Dallas.”
While the conversation surrounding Season Three was deafening, Isaacs himself, who traditionally uses voice as a means to get comfortable with a character, was tasked with conversing much less than he’s used to. “I like talking,” added Isaacs. “That was one of the interesting things about playing Tim: he didn’t get many words to convey the catastrophe inside his head. His mind is full of thoughts about, ‘how can I get out of this?’ And then playing out the different scenarios of shame and disgrace that he’d rather avoid, and then a whole bunch of other spiritual things.” On working under White’s direction, Isaacs added, “I think I’d leave the camera rolling more,” in discussing how White has inspired his potential future endeavors behind the camera. “There’s a desire for directors to talk too much. With Mike, less is more. He’d often just go again, and then he’d very gently, he’d offer up suggestions so gently like a soap bubble, but they were solid gold. Sometimes I’d watch other people around me miss them and not realize what he was really saying was, ‘you might want to do this,’ and you did always want to do that thing, but he also trusted the actors. He’d start cackling behind the camera, this hilarious screaming laugh he’d have. Then he’d go, ‘honey, why didn’t you try?’ And then he’d throw some mad suggestion out. He gave himself a lot of choices in the edit. He didn’t narrow things down, and I trusted him enough to give him many, many choices. To make it faster, or funnier, or slower, or more regretful. I don’t normally like to give directors those choices. That’s what I think I’m hired for, is my decision making, because you do a scene in March and then you storm out the room, and you come out the room again in July and you do it the same, you go, ‘I’ll do my bit and you do your bit.’ But with Mike, I will go, ‘you know what? Let’s do it together.’ Am I inspired by him? I mean, there’s being inspired and there’s also being intimidated.”
Coming back to the hype explosion for this season of The White Lotus, Isaacs affirmed the inscrutable nature of Hollywood. “I’ve been asked that a million times about Potter, about why it was so successful,” said Isaacs. “Nobody has any idea why something is as successful as this. I’m speaking from Los Angeles, I live in London, but I’m here briefly for a work visit, and everybody around me talks about how they know how it works, and they’re trying to repeat it. But who knows? If you’re making Coke, you can research different branding and New Coke and all that. Nobody knows when it comes to storytelling, which is why when something good happens, they want to milk it every which way but loose, they want to put Roman numerals after it and make it forever until the actors are on walking frames.” The actor did offer one potential safe bet to success, however: “with Mike White, he wrote these stories and they got bigger and bigger. Clearly none bigger than season three, and now they’re thinking, I know what the answer is. The answer is Mike White. Everyone just needs to work with Mike White.”
The complete third season of The White Lotus is available to stream now on HBO Max. Check out our full interview with Jason Isaacs below, where we also dive into which pieces of the actor’s characters stay with him after production wraps, the dichotomy of experiencing all the lows of Timothy’s arc on set vs. seeing an audience delight in his antics, a thorough examination of Timothy’s pivotal scene with a Buddhist monk late in the season, and more!
Jason Isaacs is Emmy-eligible in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for The White Lotus.
He is also a regular contributor and podcast host at The Playlist and now the lovely folks over at AwardsWatch. A versatile media journalist Griffin has interviewed some of the industry's leading creatives, reported on breaking news, and attended film festivals and other exclusive industry events.
Griffin is the world's biggest Nolan fan (eat your heart out Ryan), loves James Bond, and has some of the wildest takes out there...like seriously, he's the weirdo who actually loves The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
You can find Griffin on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@FilmSpeak, Twitter: @griffschiller, Instagram: @griffschiller
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