Alison Stewart (3:10)

Poor guy, he works so hard he needs to calm his ass down. Tim is played by actor Jason Isaacs, who is nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama series. Alongside some of his co stars, Jason is an acting veteran playing a variety of roles from Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter to steel in Black Hawk down to a grieving father in Mass. Jason Isaacs joined us in studio and he started by commenting on the clip we just played.

Jason Isaacs (3:46)

Well, it's nice that you found a clip where I'm not swearing because I'm not sure. I think that might be the only sentence in all eight episodes.

Alison Stewart (3:51)

Oh, we tried.

Jason Isaacs (3:51)

Well done, you.

Alison Stewart (3:52)

No swearing on public radio.

Jason Isaacs (3:54)

Fair enough. I, I'll abide by any rules you.

Alison Stewart (3:57)

Give me if, you know we have a delay.

Jason Isaacs (3:59)

Though I love the fact that you said veteran there, but also middle aged. I'm thinking I'm 61. Will I live to 122? It's possible. Nowadays, I'm following Brian Johnson.

Alison Stewart (4:06)

He wants, you know, we'll follow the sunset. How are you, by the way?

Jason Isaacs (4:11)

Well, I'm, you know, go ahead, tell.

Alison Stewart (4:13)

Us, tell us the story.

Jason Isaacs (4:14)

So I am in the middle of a, as all of us are, in the middle of a publicity blitz for this show which seems to need no publicity because everybody in the world apparently is watching it. But. But this morning I did this thing called the Buzzfeed Puppies at the behest of my go godchildren Marley and Lila in London, who said, please, please do the puppies. So I begged. And. And you sit in a little pen and these gorgeous little puppies cuddle you. And you are meant to be so distracted by their fluffiness that you can't answer the questions. I was distracted by the fact they were sinking their fangs into every part of my body and my arm now has a giant gash in it for which I might need some kind of surgery. Oh, and multiple gashes.

Alison Stewart (4:50)

It's big.

Jason Isaacs (4:51)

And the shirt, which was designated for the rest of the publicity all day is spattered with blood. So I'm fine, but a little bit sore is the answer.

Alison Stewart (4:59)

Ooh. I'll be gentle with you.

Jason Isaacs (5:00)

However, can I say it was gorgeous nonetheless. And they didn't know what they were doing their puppies.

Alison Stewart (5:08)

Is Mike White that tough?

Jason Isaacs (5:09)

Is he a biter?

Alison Stewart (5:09)

Is he a biter?

Jason Isaacs (5:10)

Yes.

Alison Stewart (5:10)

Is Mike White a biter?

Jason Isaacs (5:11)

He's not a bit. He's the opposite, actually. He kills you with kindness. Now, Mike White is an extraordinary man. For anyone who's watching the show, you won't need telling what a brilliant writer he is. But I think his directing gets ignored or people forget the fact that he's the guy that brings it to life as well as imagining it all and writing it all. And he directs this. Well, come at it another way. My 19 year old daughter wants to be a film director and she's directed plays. And I was there when someone asked her how she directs actors and she said, well, it's the same with all actors, isn't it? It's got to be a compliment sandwich. And Mike White comes out from behind the monitor from where he has been shrieking with demonic laughter. How you know that maybe you'll be moving on because he's just uncontrollable with laughter. And then he comes out and he goes, awesome, great, neat, fantastic. And then, you know, you may be going to go again. As he's walking away, he turns over his shoulder a bit like Peter Falker's Colombo. For those viewers over 100 like me. And he, you know, Peter Falk used to come as a detective and investigate people. As he was leaving, he'd go, one more thing, my wife is a big fan of you. So Mike would just throw a little tip over his shoulder, half a suggestion. You're an idiot if you didn't take it whole and do exactly what he says. But he's a magnificent director, partly because he's also a great actor. So before he speaks to you, he'll come out from behind the monitor, tell you it was great, and then walk around muttering, playing all the parts to himself. When he gets to your bit, he kind of frowns, tries it a few different ways. Then he comes over and gives the note and yeah, I mean, if in another world and possibly using AI he will be playing all the parts, maybe season four will all be Mike White. And I for one will be watching.

Alison Stewart (6:41)

You have a good ear for accents.

Jason Isaacs (6:44)

Well, I'm British, so there's a weird thing that people don't realize, Americans don't realize about British people, English people particularly when somebody opens their mouth. In England, everybody can place them. I don't mean geographically, although that definitely regionally, you can place them socioeconomically, you can fight. You can hear what kind of education they've had. You can hear how they would like to be perceived and whether they're making their accent a bit more street or a little bit more. All those things are apparent to everybody within a syllable. So if you're a British actor, that better be a tool that you can use in order to convey who someone is. And also you can hear confidence. You can hear Braggadocio. You can hear mock conference. You can all those things in someone's voice.

Alison Stewart (7:22)

Did you do. Did you work with a voice coach?

Jason Isaacs (7:26)

There is a woman called Liz Himelstein who's one of the world's great dialect coaches. She worked with a lot of big Hollywood stars who was available to all of us. And yes, I work with her because I don't just want to be from Durham, North Carolina. Well, the one thing I really didn't want to do was do a wash of Southern people. I know friends from the south hate it when actors do something like a Southern. There's no such thing as a southern. Kentucky's different from Alabama, different from Arkansas. This is Durham, North Carolina. He's also a particular guy from Durham. He's old money. He's blue blood money. And the accent in Durham, in a certain section of the community golf clubs, generally has two vowel sounds that are English. They're a hangover from the colonial days.

Alison Stewart (8:04)

Tell me.

Jason Isaacs (8:05)

It's got a short vowel sound. The o sound like. Instead of not you, they say not. And they also say, I know, I'm going. It's a. It's a diphthong. And so when I do it, there was a. For a while there when people were talking about those things on the Internet, there were people saying, he sounds Australian, he sounds English. I don't. I sound like the guy from Durham. And some people were going, no, no, no, he sounds like my dad. And one guy said, he sounds like everyone at my golf club. But, yeah, it's because I'm English. I come at it from a. You know, I need to build the entire thing, every vowel, every consonant, and the music of it from scratch. But accents are music. They're not really sounds.

Alison Stewart (8:40)

Did you build your character based on his ancestry? Because there is a period when you're like my grand.

Jason Isaacs (8:49)

At that point. Then. Now we're getting into the grain of it at that point. He's very, very drunk and heavily drugged out. So people's accents comes out, the action they had when they were young, before they went to business school. So, for instance, my natural accent, I talked like that when I was kids. I don't know if you can tell where that's from, but I'm from Liverpool. And that accent I had is very, very posh for Liverpool. I have relatives who talk like that, that order chicken and chips at a shop, you know, But. But mine was much more refined because I'd had allocution lessons. Well, I don't talk like that now. But if I Get very drunk or very tired or very angry. I do. So that's Timothy without his guard up.

Alison Stewart (9:24)

When the puppies get you.

Jason Isaacs (9:25)

When the puppies get me, yeah. Believe me. So I, I love voices. I love everything about them. And, and you can hear him disappear deep into himself as well. Timothy and his kids don't have the accent. They will have gone to different schools and they won't want to sound like.

Alison Stewart (9:38)

Their dad before everything goes bonkers. When we first meet him.

Jason Isaacs (9:44)

Yeah.

Alison Stewart (9:45)

What's important to him?

Jason Isaacs (9:47)

Oh, status. I mean, first of all, life is easy for him. I got myself a little bit plump, you know, he's a fat cat. He has the entire world at his disposal. It's generational wealth. It goes back. The entitlement goes back forever, probably to the Mayflower. And he's where he is. There are statues to him, you know, if there aren't, there will be. And what's important to him is his kids. Can he, can this dynasty continue? I've got Patrick Schwarzenegger, the lovely Pat Schwarzenegger, playing the awful Saxon myself. Awful. And he wants to be like his dad, but he isn't. You know, he's trying, but it's not quite landing. And then there's the other two, as far as Tim's concerned, when he gets there, the other two losers who are not making it the way he wants them to be, they're not fighting their way in the world the way they could be.

Alison Stewart (10:32)

But did he have to fight his way?

Jason Isaacs (10:34)

No, he didn't have to fight his way. He thinks he did. You know, it's all, it's all testosterone and braggadocio with him. What's important to him? I, I don't know. I, I, he's worried about his wife. Who wouldn't be? Take a look at her. Like the way she's behaving. They lost each other a long time ago. She's drugged out of her mind, so things aren't going that great to start with, but the world is falling at his feet and he has that, you know, a. It's all disposable income and it's unlimited.

Alison Stewart (11:01)

It's interesting. You have to do a lot of acting while you're on the phone.

Jason Isaacs (11:05)

I do. Thanks for noticing that. It's not easy. There was no one there and no one on the phone. One of my first jobs out of drama school when I. Sorry, yeah, out of drama school. But when I left university, it was when Thatcher and Reagan had just deregulated the world of finance and so everybody was getting recruited to be commodity salesmen or currency traders or whatever. And all of my friends, people who'd done a macrame degree, it didn't matter what you did. You were suddenly given a Porsche and giant shoulder pads and a bunch of money. And I went to drama school instead. So when I came out of drama school, I got a job in a show set in the kind of Wolf of Wall street world. And I knew those people. I'd been to college. I went to watch them and, you know, I watched them get their giant houses and their cars and lose them and watch the inner linings of their nose dissolve and all the rest of it. So I learned to do phone acting because so many of my scenes were on the phone. Traders were on the phone all the time, and there was no one on that phone. So I thanked God that that was one of my first jobs 35 years ago, because you're right, a lot of my acting is on the phone in this, and. And it's no fun. And then months later, when the show was finished, I was back, and I was on the phone in my house with the different actors who play people at the other end. In fact, I went to Scott Galloway's apartment here in New York, who is not an actor, and I spent hours with him, and he had a slow realization that he's one of the world's great podcasters and a brain the size of the planet. But there's a little bit more involved in acting than he'd first thought.

Alison Stewart (12:27)

One of the hotel's policies is to. To give up your devices. Why doesn't Tim want to comply? I think it's because he has issues with being told what to do.

Jason Isaacs (12:36)

Well, he lives his life on the phone. He said, maybe the market moves very, very quickly. You need to know what's happening. You know, if, for instance, if. If we imagine that President Trump was in office, 1/2 a comment on Air Force One, suddenly the world's markets turn around overnight. So most trades nowadays, it might be surprised people listening who don't know much about the stock market. I don't know or care much about it, but billions of trades a second are done by supercomputers. So it's very rare that human beings are involved in lots of trades. Anyway, you can't be off grid. You can't possibly be off grid when you're in the world of finance.

Alison Stewart (13:10)

He does, for a moment, though, give up his phone.

Jason Isaacs (13:12)

Well, that's because he realized the entire world has evaporated and everything that he was is gone. And he doesn't quite know what to do about it. And the last thing he wants is anyone else in the family to find out while he tries to work out what to do about it, if anything, if there's anything to be done or is this the last four days of their lives?

Alison Stewart (13:29)

I was wondering, is it the kind of thing. They're that kind of guy that it'll get better. We'll just put it away.

Jason Isaacs (13:35)

Well, so someone will fix it. These were discussions with Mike early on. He's incredibly. Not only is, okay, he's a genius, but he's also very collaborative. And I had said, well, this guy would throw lawyers at it. There are certain people in the world who, when they get in trouble that seems irreversible and. And bound to bring them down. They just throw lawyers at it for years and the problems go away and they, you know, jam up the courts, whatever. And he went to good point. So we tried to. That. That became part of some of the phone calls. And yeah, he does think the lawyer is going to sort things out because the lawyers have always sorted things out. You throw enough money at any problem when the lawyer comes back and goes, there's no way out of this one. It's such a shock to him that he turns on the lawyer because certain people can't accept responsibility and turn everything into. I don't know who I'm thinking of. I'm sure you can fill in the gaps yourself.

Alison Stewart (14:21)

His wife seems sort of half stoned.

Jason Isaacs (14:24)

Half stoned. I don't know who you're hanging out the weekends, but yes, his wife is popping pills like a lunatic until I take them.

Alison Stewart (14:32)

Do you think. Does she really know what her husband's up to?

Jason Isaacs (14:36)

I'm not sure she remembers his full name. Yeah, she doesn't know what's going on most of the time. One of the reasons that Parker is so entertaining in the show is that she has, you know, half a toe in reality and nine and a half toes off in the surreal world of Victoria Rad.

Alison Stewart (14:50)

We've had her here.

Jason Isaacs (14:51)

She's. She's a pistol. I wasn't talking about Parker in real life, although it does apply partly. Yes, that's true.

Alison Stewart (14:57)

I wonder, you know, is there. Is there a still magnolia to her character?

Jason Isaacs (15:03)

Well, I don't want to say what's coming down the line, but of course she doesn't have the drugs anymore, so she's bought very, very slowly back up to the surface and maybe too quickly heard like somebody getting the bends and the world comes into focus and what was that kind of languid, sleepy energy becomes what those people are like when they don't get their pills. And, and you get to see and be entertained by that too.

Alison Stewart (15:23)

It's funny because your character says, I don't take drugs. Let me see him taking the drugs.

Jason Isaacs (15:29)

Well, yes, he's. He's not burdened by the responsibility to tell the truth in the world generally. That's why he got into this trouble. And, and also he's all about what other people think about him. He's all about. His wife thinks about him, his children think about him. And one of the, One of the. So many great things about Mike but choosing to settle in Thailand is it's a place that people go to seek enlightenment and it's a place that rich people go to buy enlightenment, think or spiritual growth. And of course, yeah, none of these people get what they think they want or need, but they get what Mike lines up for them. And fate conspires to strip Timothy down the way Buddhists would have it, to his essential self. And I'm not sure that happens to Victoria. But. But he looks around him at the people who he loves and whose job it is to protect and. And rightfully, he. He fears for how they're going to cope.

Alison Stewart (16:21)

Actors have to feel empathetic for their characters, even though we might see them as different.

Jason Isaacs (16:26)

I disagree.

Alison Stewart (16:27)

You do?

Jason Isaacs (16:28)

I don't think you have to feel anything for your character. You have to be your character. Are you empathetic for yourself? In the morning, do you ever think about whether you're empathetic for yourself?

Alison Stewart (16:34)

I'm just me, though.

Jason Isaacs (16:35)

Exactly. I'm just him. And people go, do you like him? Do you dislike him? I'm him. I'm him with the things he worries about, the things he. The times that he's confronted with. Has he done the right thing or the wrong thing? We do that sometimes ourselves and struggle with it. Mostly we just do the thing that we do and a bit like, you know, Gladwell, Michael, Michael Malcolm Gladwell's blink. We make our decisions and then we rationalize or we find some confirmation bias to allow us to feel comfortable with those decisions. And, you know, even those people who seem to us brutal, some of the worst people in the world to us who make immoral decisions and are people who just have a different view of the world, that it's Darwinian and that, you know, nobody judges a lion for eating a wildebeest at the watering hole and people who are crushing or brutal or, you know, I feel like, that.

Alison Stewart (17:19)

Is the way you understand why he eats it, though.

Jason Isaacs (17:22)

Ah, no, you said. You said empathize. I need to understand. I need to have all of his thoughts. I need to have. I need to think like he thinks. I need to worry about things he worries about. I need to. That was the challenge for this. I didn't. I don't speak for so much of it, but I'm thinking like crazy. His mind is, you know, like a kaleidoscope off kilter, and I had to have all those thoughts in my head.

Alison Stewart (17:41)

Yeah, that's so interesting.

Jason Isaacs (17:42)

People think when actors cry, they need to think about their puppy getting run over. No, I need to think about the things that are making the character sad and I need to feel sad.

Alison Stewart (17:52)

So from your taking the role, you knew what happened to Tim?

Jason Isaacs (17:56)

Yeah, yeah. No, we all got all the scripts. It wasn't one of those things where they hand you out pages day by day. We all, weirdly, we all got the scripts and then when we got to Thailand, they got incredibly secretive about the script and they took us off, took it off us all the time. When we traveled between islands, we had to hand them all in and get them all back again. Reminded me of the days when I used to get the Harry Potter script, but the day before an NDA would arrive and it would be the size of War and Peace and I'd have to sign it, and I would always sign at Mickey Mouse going, you do realize the book's been on sale for two years. There's nothing that secretive in here. But, yes, they're very, very secretive about the end. Even my wife who was there said to me, did you shoot four or five different endings? And I went, what planet were you living on? You were there, love. So they were secretive about it. But yes, we all knew what was coming.

Alison Stewart (18:38)

That was my conversation with Emmy nominated actor Jason Isaacs. Up next, actor Jenny Slate plays the best friend of a woman with stage 4 cancer experiencing sexual awakening in her final days. In the dramatic comedy series, it's titled Dying for Sex. Slate joins us alongside co showrunner Kim Rosenstock to discuss.

Jason Isaacs (19:06)

If your small business is booming. You might say Cha Ching, but you should say, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. And we'll help your growing business. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

LifeLock Advertiser (19:21)

Sometimes an identity threat is a ring of professional hackers, and sometimes it's an overworked accountant who forgot to encrypt their connection while sending bank details.

Jason Isaacs (19:29)

I need a coffee.

LifeLock Advertiser (19:31)

And you need lifelock because your info is in endless places. It only takes one mistake to expose you to identity theft. Lifelock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it, guaranteed. Or your money back.

Jason Isaacs (19:45)

Back.

LifeLock Advertiser (19:45)

Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock. Com. SpecialOffer Terms apply.