Jason Isaacs

Hi. The Radcliffe family, yes? That's us. How was your flight? Long layover in Doha, but it's all forgotten now.

How did you find us, may I ask? Well, Piper here is a senior, thank you, at Chapel Hill.

and she's a religious studies major, so she's writing her thesis on, well, what's your thesis on, Pop? Well, it's on Buddhism, and there's a monk at a monastery near here. Anyway, she wants to interview him. So we made a family road trip.

I was in Koh Samui. You sent me your first recordings. I listened to it. I almost shit my pants because I was like...

This sucks. I don't know if it's going to fly. And I think I had, then I heard you mention it on, on, I think on pivot. And so I was extra nervous that I was going to somehow disappoint you. I did not want to disappoint you. And so I called, I think I got, maybe I was back in LA or might've been still in Thailand.

And then I was like, I had the smart idea of sending Jason Isaacs over to your apartment. Just, you know, I was like, maybe Jason could help you read with you. And I remember I was like very anxious. I was like, Jason, call me as soon as you get out of there. Jason called me and he goes, we did an hour of takes. It could be all dog shit. Maybe there's something in there.

And I have to say, genuinely, you are great in the show. In those hour of recordings, we found gold. I'm hoping this is the beginning of a long Hollywood career for you.

Well, I'm immediately offended by using the word archetype there because Mike White is far too nuanced A sophisticated writer. You're absolutely right. He introduces people you think are archetypes, and then he adds or strips off layers and layers, and you go, wait, I thought I knew this person who they were, and they've become richer.

Well, for me, because I'm English, I started with a voice. I knew of some Durham, North Carolina, so I got some people from North Carolina until I honed it down to one particular person whose voice I wanted to do and broke it down phonetically. So there was the voice. But also, he's what Tom Wolfe called a big swinging dick. It's incredibly important to him how other people see him.

Not that he's anxious about it, because it goes well for him. He has a huge status within his family and in his community back home. So you need to build that first before Mike starts to puncture it. The Zeppelin starts to leak very, very slowly, and then it deflates very quickly with a couple of phone calls. You look at the function of the story. What kind of person would create Saxon as a son?

and just come in dripping with power and privilege and entitlement and a total lack of doubt, and then allow the audience, at least, certainly not me, to enjoy the journey as all the things that he thinks he is are taken away. And this is, it's White Lotus in Thailand, and Mike's been explicit that it's a search for identity. What is the self?

And I think Tim probably faces it more than anybody because everything that he is is threatened to be taken away and everything that his family think they are too. So the pressure builds to a hideous climax.

To create this character. My catastrophic failures on the screen, they don't really match up. Yeah, the great man smiling. Possibly people who know me well might see what I have in common. I don't think I have any comments here. I think I'm a bit of a blank slate as a human being. I'm not quite sure. I have a very amorphous personality.

I tend to adopt the accent of whoever I'm talking to after a short while. I just jumped into the world that Mike created, and the bits seem to fill themselves in. It's a bit like, you know, you have an outline and you fill up from the inside or outside or the jigsaw slowly fills itself. What really helps is the other actors.

So when you're looking in other people's eyes and they seem to be your children, this person seems to be your wife. And luckily, thank God, we're one of the shows that's still on a real location before AI makes it all happen in a computer. So anything that helps you trick your imagination

is of use because that's what acting is just imagining you or someone else in another situation but 99.9 of it is mike's ability to dream up full and human worlds i think well let me ask a different way then is it was it then fun different answer josh

That's a very perceptive question because he's really unhappy. I mean, I experienced as much as I could. I know it's pretend acting, but when you're very, very angry, you come away with your cells, you know, carry the anger. If you're crying all day, which I've done films with, kids get killed and stuff. I did a film called Mass, which was all about losing a son and hanging onto the anger.

You know, we cried for weeks. It was incredibly stressful being him. And yes, you're right. I love that. All actors love that. We like vicarious, extreme experiences. So I get to, you know, I've been in war numbers of times, but they're not real bullets. So as close as I ever want to get, I do. And this is as close as I ever want to get to my world falling apart and being broken. Yes, it is fun.

The more extreme, the more fun. Although I shat myself, to be honest, when I read the script to start with, I thought, oh, wait, I've got to raise my game, and I've got to, can I pull that scene off? Mike's written something really extreme, and I've got to make it truthful and emotional, and those things are demanding. I mean, you can't always get there, but it did feel like it was scary biscuits.

Two things, one, having some big acting, and two, having to hide a secret for many episodes without words and in ways that aren't boring. That was also a challenge.

And at least- Everyone being a dagger to the soul for me, every single, every time someone thinks or says that, I know, I mean, there is a cliff coming at me at a million miles an hour and there's no way to avoid it. And so I had that always in mind. And as an actor, what you want is secrets. You're desperate to have secrets. To say one thing and mean it is really nothing and feels like nothing.

But all the time that the dialogue's going on around me and all the stuff that he's created and structured on purpose is the stuff to make my world worse. All he does is tighten the vice on my heart. And I don't know how much the audience get of it. I was trying to feel it and think it, and I hope that they sense it in me, because I'm not talking very much.

Yeah, I mean, the writing's too complex for it to be either one of those things or the other. It's both. At the same time, it's thinking, how am I going to cut? What am I going to do? I cannot imagine a life without it. I'd equate it to someone going into rehab or going to AA or something. Like, I cannot imagine a life without this, but I have to, or I'd rather die.

And so there's people who do go into recovery, the people who go decide they want to live. Or people who are forced by a court under DUI to go to AA. They don't want to be there. They get there and they go, yeah, I could... So he's not one of those people who's gone to Thailand and gone for a Buddhist meditation retreat and thinks, you know what, I should reevaluate. He's got no choice.

He's going to have nothing. The family have nothing. So I don't think he's spending much time thinking, you know what, maybe I should have made some different choices and I'll be okay. I think he's forced, like the walls closing in on him, and forced to think, can I live without this? Can my children live it?

Can any of my children or my wife survive if they had to go and get a job in a shop and rent an apartment or live in public housing? And realizing with horror that none of them are equipped for any of those things. So yes, he's reevaluating, but it's at gunpoint. So it's not the same kind of reevaluation that people are doing around him.

Sure, he does, because he's not had to question it. He's not had to question any of those things. Things came easy to him. He was handed money. He made it into more money. He was handed status. He comes from blue blood. He probably traced his family back to the Mayflower. No, no, I think that he's probably a sensualist in many ways. I think he had all kinds of pleasure.

I don't know if he was getting pleasure from his marriage. It doesn't seem like that's going particularly well, but he gets pleasure from power and status and probably from golf and high adrenaline, gets endorphin released from pushing himself physically all the time and winning. That's why Saxon has so grotesquely misinterpreted the point of life, which is winning.

Saxon tries to dominate women everywhere and dominate his brother because he actually has no power because he works for his dad. He's watched his dad be a winner all the time. So yeah, I think he takes tremendous sensual pleasure from food and drink. He's a bit of a fat cat. I put a bunch of weight on in the show and for the show, and I was comfortable doing that.

I wanted him to be a bit of a kind of chunky fat cat. He goes to the gym a lot, but he also eats a lot and drinks a lot of red wine and all the rest of it. He's got an ample wine cellar, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think he indulges in everything, left, right, and center. There's a Henry VIII quality to him. Because the more you do that, the more there is to take away.

No, I think money makes money. You don't have to be illegal, but you do not want to pay any tax. The more rich you get, the less you want to pay tax. I think he is comfortable to get away with whatever he can get away with. I think he's a Darwinist in finance. What you can do, you should do.

He's up for any deal that he can get away with. So yeah, he's done it before. He doesn't make his money out of being crooked. He doesn't have to. He has so much money most of the time that the deals are good. But if the deal happens to break whatever law is there, if no one's going to catch him, that's fine too.

That's what I was like.

You never know. I don't think it's nearly... Look, you know, it's not... My husband's been operating a Ponzi scheme or something. He's not a crook. He's just got tons of money. He probably... I mean, this is a hedge fund with his own money and other wealthy people around him. And sometimes there you can avoid tax and move things around. And that's what everybody in that world does.

And they don't think twice about it. And so this was just another side deal for someone. So he's not, you know, is he a criminal? Yes, he's absolutely a criminal, because he doesn't, has no regard for laws that he can't be caught by. That's why he's so shocked. I played a number of criminals in my life and met the people I played a couple of times, and they go stupid if people go to prison.

I've heard more than one person say, only really stupid people get caught. Most of us get away with everything all the time. And that's, I think he feels really stupid that he got caught.

Oh, it's Piper by far.

He's disappointed by both of his sons in so many ways. Right. And he absolutely worships Piper. I mean, probably worships him in all the wrong ways and places her on a pedestal. And even though his world's falling apart so he could care less, she's going to have to get a job somewhere folding T-shirts, you know?

So all this talk about what they're going to do in the future and what she's going to do is irrelevant if he doesn't sort this situation out and he's got no solution for it. But yeah, no, it's his daughter always.

Oh, no. No, no. It doesn't matter what she says. I want to be an astronaut. I want to score the winning goal in the World Cup. None of these things are going to happen. They're going to get home. They have no house. They have no car. She has no phone. They will have no money of any kind. How's she even going to fly to Thailand?

No, no. So the whole thing is some bizarre farce playing out in front of him.

It's all over, basically. So there is no way out of this. You're going to go to prison.

Is he going to wait for the end of the week? He doesn't know. His brain is in a blender. You know, he's in free fall. But there's a gun, and you can end it quickly. And so whether he's going to do it right there in the guard station, whether he's going to write a note, whether he's going to do it late at night, the next day, at the end of the week, you know, he's not that organized at that point.

But he knows that there's a way out. And before he saw the gun, there was no way out.

I could talk about it forever.

Then maybe you didn't bring them. You're always losing things.

I've heard someone say that anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding from something.

So what about you? Are you hiding or are you seeking? I'm just on vacation with my family. But you never know.