Adelaide fans will get a chance to say hello to Hotel Mumbai star Jason Isaacs
Actor Jason Isaacs loved his time in Adelaide making Hotel Mumbai – now the Harry Potter star is returning to SA and is keen to meet fans.
Why does an actor take any role ever, asks Jason Isaacs, whose choices have included Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter, Captain Lorca in the TV series of Star Trek, Dr Hap Percy in the Netflix metaphysical drama, The OA, and Field Marshal Zhukov in the blackly satirical and extremely funny The Death of Stalin.
He is happy to answer his own question: Because it’s either a great job, or it pays a small fortune.
When he agreed to come to Australia to play a vulgar Russian oligarch trapped in an Indian hotel during a prolonged terrorist siege, it wasn’t the pay cheque. Isaacs thought the script, based on real events in Mumbai in 2008, about the heroic response of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel staff while it was under a sustained and ferocious attack, was phenomenal.
He had blocked out the summer with his agent, intending not to work at all so he could go on a long-planned family trip to Peru with his wife and two daughters, walking the Machu Picchu trail. Then the Hotel Mumbai script arrived, based in part on the stories of real participants, to be filmed in Adelaide and India with a first time director on board, Anthony Maras.
“It was about something really important and it was brilliantly written, and then I looked at Anthony’s short (The Palace), for which he was Oscar nominated, and which was magnificently well made, and I thought, ‘Why am I an actor if it’s not to do things like this?’,” he told SAWeekend. “These are the kinds of things that keep my love for the job alive.”
He broke the news to his family, told them to go without him and came to Adelaide where he spent more than a month filming interior scenes then moved to Mumbai for location shots. Three years later he is still passionate about the experience, and has been promoting the film widely in the UK where it has just been released.
Filming in Adelaide was memorable for its intensity and the way the cast stuck together on and off set. All of the main actors, Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Nazanin Boniadi, Anupam Kher, and Tilda Cobham-Hervey – who has been Patel’s partner ever since – fell into a habit of meeting together at night to emotionally debrief, eating in a rotating cycle of restaurants, including Patel’s choice of Adelaide’s best Indian, Jasmin.
Isaacs says what often happened during the making of dark films, especially horror films or thrillers, was the actors were quite jokey on set, using black humour to cope. This was different. It was about a real-life incident in which scores of people died.
All of the actors had seen a documentary interviewing the survivors and some of them had been in contact with people who were there. As well, the pacing of the film was intense and the actors spent most of their working day in a heightened emotional state of adrenaline-filled, fight or flight.
“It was very unusual and it has never happened to me in 32 years as an actor,” says Isaacs. “All of us, and I mean the main cast, would take over a restaurant every night. Adelaide has some very good restaurants and by the end of the shoot we’d been to most of them three or four times.”
Isaacs is returning to Adelaide for the first time since then early next month, in strategically timed appearances at Supanova Comic Con & Gaming in Adelaide and Brisbane before starting work on Streamline, a feature film about a young swimmer whose Olympic dream is derailed when his father comes home from prison.
With a guest role by Olympian Ian Thorpe, the film will shoot at one of Isaac’s favourite places, the Gold Coast, where he spent time 16 years ago playing Captain Hook in P.J. Hogan’s Peter Pan, living on the beach.
Isaacs’ approach to meeting fans at Supanova Comic Con & Gaming is refreshingly uncynical. He seems to genuinely enjoy the experience after being persuaded to go to one years ago by Tom Felton, who plays his onscreen son Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series.
“I thought it sounded soulless and transactional but Tom persuaded me to go and it was true – I really connect with and love meeting people who have a reason to tell you why these stories make a difference to them,” he says.
He worries that because he is an actor, people might think he somehow takes up more space in the world than they do and he is keen to meet fans and show them that while his job is unusual, he is just like them.
“I don’t know if this is unfashionable to say but I like conventions, I like meeting people,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I’m taking confession because people are thrilled – not to meet me, I just put make-up on and do funny voices, but I connect to that world whether it’s Harry Potter or Star Trek or one of my war films. They tell you what the story means to them.”
Jason Isaacs will be Supanova Comic Con & Gaming at Adelaide Showground from November 1-3.