🎧'White Lotus' Star Jason Isaacs: 'I'm a Seeker of Extreme Experiences'
The Ratliff family patriarch on life inside the bubble of a hit show, 'selfie hell' and his career advice to his on-screen children
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Warning: This post — and podcast — contain spoilers if you haven’t finished The White Lotus’ third season. (Hi Janice!)
“I’ve emerged from the bubble,” says Jason Isaacs, barely 24 hours after The White Lotus finale aired and revealed that, after a season’s worth of suicidal ideation, his character returns home from Thailand alive. After a long Hollywood career that’s included acclaimed indies and TV shows as well as mega-hits from The Patriot to the Harry Potter franchise, the 61-year-old Liverpool native has seen a wide range of responses to his work. But he’s never experienced anything quite like being on The White Lotus.
”It did seem for the last eight weeks to all of us like everybody on planet Earth was watching it,” Isaacs says of himself and his castmates, who reunited in Los Angeles on Sunday to watch the finale together. They’ve largely been traveling and doing press on their own, but Isaacs happened to be in New York on St. Patrick’s Day at the same time as his onscreen children — Patrick Schwarzenegger, Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook. They got together and went to a restaurant, and realized — too late — “Oh shit, we're the Ratliffs out on the town in New York,” as Isaacs puts it. “It turned into selfie hell.”
Having experienced the ebbs and flows of attention and acclaim, as any actor does across a long career, Isaacs says he’s tried to advise his younger co-stars to know that this kind of thing doesn’t last. But he’s also trying to learn from his own past mistakes.
On today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Isaac tells me that after the success of 2000’s The Patriot — in which he plays a villainous Revolutionary War general — he received a lot of offers to play similar blockbuster baddies. Instead, he pivoted to the stage and indies instead. A few years later, he recalls, “ I looked up and to my horror, that opened door through which all the offers were coming had slammed tight on my fingers.”
It all turned out okay, of course. Isaacs has not only been part of generation-defining projects like the Potter films or the cult favorite Netflix series The OA, but has tackled challenging, gripping roles in small indies like Mass and the upcoming The Salt Path that might not be able to exist if an actor of his stature didn’t take them on. The success of The White Lotus ought to allow him to do even more of them, and it seems safe to assume he’ll keep challenging himself. ”I’m a seeker of extreme experiences,” he tells me, “and I get to do it safely on set.”
Listen to this week’s podcast and hear the full conversation, which also includes — of course! — some talk about Southern accents and how much you can learn from hanging out in the clubhouse at a North Carolina golf course. The episode also includes a conversation between me and Natalie Jarvey, author of the Ankler’s new Like and Subscribe newsletter and expert on all things creator economy, and how Hollywood needs to start dealing with it whether they like it or not.