Actor Jason Isaacs talks Red Dog: True Blue and Netflix drama The OA

MAKING the movie Red Dog: True Blue proved to be less stressful for actor Jason Isaacs than previous run-ins with hounds.

Actor Jason Isaacs in a scene from the movie Red Rod: True Blue. Picture: David Dare Parker

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WHEN Jason Isaacs signed on for the movie Red Dog: True Blue, he was actually relieved he wouldn’t actually get any face time with the canine in question.

The British actor, best known for this role as the white-haired, villainous Death Eater Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movie franchise, has had screen run-ins with dogs in the past — and they haven’t gone well.

In the BBC crime drama Case Histories he played a private investigator who owned a dog that was very specifically described in the Kate Atkinson novels on which the series was based.

“She was so specific in the book about what breed it should be, so the trainer, who ordinarily has a lot of TV animals who can do tai chi and advanced calculus got this dog about a week before we started filming and couldn’t train it,” Isaacs recalls. “So the only thing she could do was stand on the set just out of shot shouting its name all the time and smearing sausages and blood all over me to make it go anywhere near me. God, I hated that dog.”

And on the Gold Coast set of PJ Hogan’s Peter Pan, in which he played the dual roles of Captain Hook and Mr Darling, in one scene he had to scream and tear a bonnet off a very large St Bernard in take after take. Eventually the animal trainer warned Isaac that he’d heard some deep growling- and that the dog was ready to go for him.

“PJ goes ‘OK let’s go again, but this time, Jase, really lose your rag’ and the dog starts this low growl and the cutlery starts to shake and I go ‘PJ, mate, I am not comfortable with this — I think the dog is going to go me — I think it’s backed into a corner and it’s been an hour now’. And he looks over at the trainer and says ‘are we all right?’ and the trainer says ‘oh yeah, yeah, we’re fine’. I did one more take and the thing looked like it was going to take my whole arm off and then I said ‘I’m sorry — but we’ve got it’.”

Jason Isaacs as Captain Hook in the 2003 movie Peter Pan. Picture: Supplied

Isaac plays the older version of the main character, Michael, in Red Dog: True Blue, who recounts in flashback the backstory of the Pilbara pooch made famous in the first movie. As such, he filmed his scenes in Perth rather than the Outback but says that his agents were mystified that he wanted to fly to the other side of the world for a story they had never heard of.

“Any time I mention it to any Australian it’s like you are mentioning their favourite relative,” he says with a laugh. “So once I knew that, I wanted to go. Great stories are great stories. I am sure it will be seen everywhere but the fact that so many Australians love it because it really speaks to them appealed to me enormously,” he says.

“And it’s something that families love. And as a man with two kids and living parents — there are three generations living in my house — it’s that rare thing that you all want to sit down and watch together and nobody is doing it for the sake of the other one.”

Jason Isaacs, as Michael Carter, in a scene with his wife Diane (played by Justine Clarke) in a scene from the movie Red Dog: True Blue. Picture: Roadshow Films

Isaac is a true citizen of the world — this year alone he has filmed in Australia (for another film, Hotel Mumbai), the US, Cuba and Canada — and while he’s finding it more and more difficult to juggle his travel with his role as husband and father of two, it has given him an astonishingly diverse CV of television, film, theatre and even video game and animation voice work.

In addition to appearing on the big screens in Red Dog: True Blue, he is also front and centre in The OA, which dropped on to Netflix earlier this month and is being hailed in some corners a late contender for TV series of the year. Isaac was a very late addition to the cast — and while he’s hugely proud of The OA, he’s loath to give too much away about it, saying “it is one of those things that is ruined by talking about it”.

Jason Isaacs plays Dr Hunter Hap in the acclaimed but divisive drama The OA. Picture: JoJo Whilden / Netflix

“I can tell you how it starts but that is no indication at all of where it is going,” he says, cautiously. “If you watch No. 1 you think it’s a certain kind of story. If you watch No. 2, where I come in, you think it’s another kind of story and then from about half way through you begin to get an indication of how magical, mystical, cross-genre it is. It’s a spiritual, mystical thriller about love, loss, death, magic, truth, identity — it’s one of the most wonderful things I have ever read or been in.”

“But it’s been like Vegemite — people either love it or hate it. Luckily it’s been breaking down about 90-10 or 80-20, with critics as well. Some people are just obsessed with it and just can’t stop watching it and think it’s one of the most courageous, extraordinary, risky, unusual things they have ever seen. And some people are hopping mad — and want to go down to Netflix with banners and then come around and burn my house down.”

SEE RED DOG TRUE IS IN CINEMAS NOW

SEE THE OA IS ON NETFLIX NOW