Jason Isaacs: ‘There are people out there who are comfortable in their skin. I don’t know what that feels like’
Jason Isaacs thinks any actor would be a “f***ing idiot to play Cary Grant”. And yet, next week, that’s exactly what we will see him doing, in ITVX’s four-part drama Archie. Written by Jeff Pope, Oscar-nominated for Philomena in 2014, the series dramatises the story of Hollywood’s most prolific leading man, from his traumatic childhood in Bristol to the glories of his movie career, and, in particular, the turbulence of his short-lived marriage to Dyan Cannon, his fourth wife, with whom he had his only child, Jennifer, in 1966.
“Grant was the most beautiful man in every room; men and women wanted him, he was the biggest star in the world for 30 years,” says the 60-year-old Isaacs in between sips of tea and the occasional clang from the adjacent Soho Hotel restaurant kitchen. “I’m a jobbing actor.”
Isaacs is hardly that. In , though, he hasn’t exactly been cast to type. With a career spanning more than three decades, Isaacs is famous for playing not the characters we idolise, but the ones we fear. He’s best known as Lucius Malfoy, the spittingly sinister father of. He lent delicious menace to the voice of Count Dracula in . He even managed to bring his signature sneer to the third season of Netflix’s as Peter Groff – a “pumped-up s*** of a man”, as Groff’s own brother Michael puts it.
