From Potter to Pinter

10 April 2012

The last drink you would expect Jason Isaacs to order is a cup of herbal tea. This, he explains, is because he has a cold - but really, it's a bit soft for an actor who has spent the last decade playing lean, mean, hard men on screen.

Obviously, only the very silly would assume actors are like the characters they play but Isaacs is truly nothing like the savage Colonel Tavington in Mel Gibson's The Patriot in 2000 or the thuggish ex-para in the 1992 TV series Civvies.

At this very moment he's even confessing to feeling terrified. 'We've got two weeks to rehearse the thing from scratch,' he says. 'I'm sh*t scared.'

The 'thing' is The Dumb Waiter, Harold Pinter's menacing, 1957 two-hander about two hired killers waiting in a basement.

Isaacs - who is best known for playing evil Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter franchise - admits he initially took the part because he heard that comedian Lee Evans would also be in the cast.

'Even Lee is scared,' he says. 'When we had our first meeting, Lee said [adopting Evans's voice] "What are you talking about? We just work 12 hours a day for seven days a week, it'll be fine." Then we had a meeting and Lee said: "I've been looking at that play. There's no f**king way we can do it in two weeks."'

The Dumb Waiter is an odd mix of B-movie thriller, Beckett-influenced surrealism and vaudevillian farce in which the assassins, Gus and Ben, gradually become the victims of a game played by someone they cannot see and whose rules they do not understand.

'Now is a perfect time to do it,' says 43-year-old Isaacs. 'It's steeped in paranoia. I've got two small children; I spend my life terrified about what might happen and I listen to people all the time who tell me all sorts of conspiracy theories about ID cards and bombings, how much we should believe in the papers and how much we are really in control of anything we do.

Yesterday, I noticed six surveillance cameras outside the rehearsal studios. Six cameras on a church hall in South London.

'It's interesting how much fear was part of Pinter's world in the late 1950s and how much it's a part of our world now.'

Isaacs, who grew up in Liverpool and fell into acting while studying law at Bristol, has racked up at least 30 Hollywood movies as well as several high-profile TV roles and a smattering of stage roles.

Although he has never exercised much control over his parts, he's certainly played his fair share of violent men.

He's been an RUC officer struggling to throw off the legacy of the Troubles in Gary Mitchell's play The Force Of Change; ruthless gangster Michael Caffee in the recent American TV series Brotherhood; and a working-class thug (Chris) in last year's searing docudrama Scars on Channel 4. Isaacs points out he has also played priests (in The End Of The Affair) and transvestites (in Sweet November).

Have his tougher roles, playing hard-boiled mobsters such as Caffee and Chris, helped feed into his understanding of the threatening world of Pinter's play? And have they given him insight into Ben and Gus: two assassins who, on one level, demand the sympathy of the audience?

'I've certainly met plenty of soldiers and criminals in my time, men who've killed people, and they've become this swirling soup of research material from which I can take bits in order to make the character I'm playing work,' he says.

'And most of the violent characters I've played have come from very hard, impoverished backgrounds. But everything that happens to somebody happens for a specific reason.

'With Pinter, the joy is in the mystery. If there's no mystery, then it becomes a crap performance.

'This play is about a relationship between two men and there's some part of Harold's world view in every single moment of it and yet it gives us no conclusion.

'Great storytellers such as Harold stick the story out there but if you ask them to condense it into a few sentences, they look at you in horror because if they could condense it, they would.'

Given the extent to which he researches his characters, it's no surprise Isaacs enjoys playing Potter baddie Malfoy.

'I'm always so tortured about work - it's always about trying to find the truth in a character - so it's great with Harry Potter to devote my attention to devising ever-more ingenious ways of blasting Gary Oldman with a wand,' he says.

'That said, I'm not in the sixth film because Malfoy is in prison. There is no one on Earth waiting more eagerly than me for JK Rowling to publish the seventh book this summer. I'm desperate to know if I'm in it.'

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