No White Lotus luxury as Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson do it tough

Curiously enough, Jason Isaacs saw an unexpected overlap between Timothy Ratliff, his tormented loadsamoney crooked financier in the most recent season of The White Lotus, and the character he plays in his new film, The Salt Path. Both had suddenly lost everything. Ratliff was being pursued by the FBI for fraud and contemplating killing himself and his family rather than endure the shame of a court case.

Moth Winn, hero of The Salt Path, is a decent Welsh farmer who tried to support an old mate’s business and is now liable for its losses. As the film begins, he and his wife, Raynor – played by Gillian Anderson – are hiding under the stairs while the bailiffs beat on the door. They don’t know what to do.

“The contrast is in who they become when they lose everything, both their status and their resources,” says Isaacs. Like Ratliff, Moth is ashamed; it was his job to provide for his family. “But it takes nothing for Moth to be empathetic towards the community of homeless people around him because he never thought of himself as above anyone else,” Isaacs continues. “Whereas Tim spends his entire life thinking that it’s the most important thing: to maintain that distance between himself and normal human beings.” Poverty disgusts him. As the Winns discover when they become homeless, it disgusts a lot of people.

Jason Isaacs as the troubled Timothy Ratliff in The White Lotus.

The Salt Path is adapted from Raynor Winn’s best-selling memoir of what she and Moth did after they came out from under the stairs. While they were there, wondering how they could just leave their lives behind, she put her hand on an unopened guide to the South West Coast Path, which runs for 630 miles (1014 kilometres) around the north and south coasts of Cornwall and Devon, with Land’s End its turning point. In a single moment, they decided to walk that path.

It was madness. In the same week that a county judge ruled that they had to pay their former friend’s debt, Moth had been diagnosed with CBD, a neurological condition that, among other symptoms, made him so stiff that he dragged one leg. He was supposed to rest, take gentle exercise and avoid carrying a load. Instead, he set off with Raynor carrying a tent, deplorably inadequate sleeping bags and a camp stove.

They had just £40 ($82) a week. Their children were at college. The couple had phones, but couldn’t afford to call them. Bed and breakfasts were not an option; even cafes were largely out of bounds. They were often wet, cold and so hungry they would stand outside cafes watching other people eat, which Winn describes in her vivid book as “virtual eating”. Just as vivid, however, are her descriptions of the surging surf, sunlight and the sight of a peregrine wheeling overhead. The experience transformed them. Winn became a nature writer. The Salt Path went on to sell 2 million copies around the world.

Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs play Raynor and Moth Winn, who defied doctors and logic when they set out on The Salt Path.Credit: Transmission Films

Gillian Anderson was riveted by the audio book, read by Winn herself, when it was first released. She tried to option the film rights, but found she had been beaten to it; a year later, she was asked if she would be interested in playing Raynor. Of course, she jumped at it. Together with well-known theatre director Marianne Elliott – who was embarking, in her 50s, on her first film – she and Isaacs had Zoom calls with the real couple.

‘The contrast is in who they become when they lose everything.’

Jason Isaacs

“I had the gift of both the book – which is her experience - and also the gift of her having read it,” she says. Zooming felt superfluous. “That book is really all of it. But Jason spent a lot of time talking to Moth. About all sorts of things, but very specifically his disease.”

Moth was an autodidact with a huge library of books – all but one of which went to the bailiffs - and extraordinary recall for anything he had read. “So he was a sort of walking encyclopaedia who would entertain his wife and kids by constantly knowing everything about everything,” says Isaacs. With CBD, he forgot everything, even what he was saying in the middle of a sentence.

“I admire him so much,” says Isaacs. “The strength it takes for such a manly man, which is what he is – he’s a big, strong farmer who had been very alpha, not in his attitudes but in his physical achievements – to admit to me how his wife had to do the most basic things for him, get him out of bed and dress him and move his arms and legs around – although he would turn these things into something akin to a comedy routine. I sometimes stopped and thought, ‘why am I laughing as he tells me these terrible things?’ Because he wanted to put me at my ease.”

“He was actually thinking all the time about stepping off the path and going down the cliff,” says Jason Isaacs of the man he plays in The Salt Path.Credit: Transmission Films

He did the same thing for his wife as they walked the path. He was in pain, especially at first when he could often walk only a mile in a day. “They talked about how they laughed a lot and how that’s the thing that saved them, but he also told me – for the first time in front of Ray and this is you know, years later, when I met him – that he was actually thinking all the time about stepping off the path and going down the cliff. He thought they’d all be better off without him, he’d let them all down so badly.” Not so different from Tim Ratliff, then, when it comes down to it.

Before The White Lotus, Jason Isaacs was most recognised as Lucius Malfoy, Slytherin’s most famous alumnus in the Harry Potter films, with a long blond wig and stylish line in velvet coats – a look he devised himself, he says. That followed his first star turn as Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot, opposite Mel Gibson, and then as Captain Hook in Peter Pan, directed by P.J. Hogan – “your fellow Australian, a brilliant writer and director”. The film, massively hyped before release, flopped at the box office.

Jason Isaacs as the blond and menacing Lucius Malfoy.Credit: Warner Bros.

“That badly affected all of our careers,” he remembers. “But it’s turned out to be one of the most popular films I’ve ever made, with a massive following all over the world.” Millions of children, he discovered when he went to fan conventions, couldn’t get enough of his villainy.

Running alongside these milestones are any number of diplomats, dealers, detectives and doctors he has played in film and on television, but it is the exuberant baddies that stand out in his CV – which is funny, given how affable and entertaining he is in person. Friends interviewed for longer profiles remark on his kindness, his devotion to family and his unflagging support for the many charities he represents.

“My mum spent her whole life working for and starting various charities,” he wrote in a remarkably confessional piece for The Big Issue during lockdown. “It was always clear to me that the purpose of life is to be of service, and when you are of service, it fills a void in you that nothing else can ever touch.” It is a word he uses again now, talking about the Winns’ hope that this film will also be “of service”; that people will see it “and think twice when they look at people in a doorway, as we had to learn to do”.

Marianne Elliott saw Isaacs as Moth as soon as she met him. “The thing about Moth, the real Moth, is he is just so personable you fall in love with him immediately,” she says. “Everybody does. He’s charming, he’s funny, he’s positive, he’s got the most incredible blue eyes. He feels like a life force despite the fact he has this terminal diagnosis hanging over his head. And when I met Jason, he talked 13 to the dozen, he was very funny, he was charming, he had these bright blue eyes! You know, it wasn’t rocket science.”

The famously glamorous Gillian Anderson seemed more unlikely as Raynor, who frequently described how dirty, sunburnt and unkempt she was in the book; there were very few showers along the way. “Obviously nobody’s seen Gillian like this – I hadn’t – but when I met her, I thought, ‘you know what, she understands the story, it would really be a big stretch for her but she really wants to go on that journey’. Every time you cast someone, it’s a risk. You never really know. But Gillian threw herself into it; she was an absolute dream.”

“Nobody’s seen Gillian [Anderson] like this,” says The Salt Path director Marianne Elliott.Credit: Transmission Films

Both Anderson and Isaacs helped lug cameras up and down the Cornish cliffs. With few access roads and a small crew, everyone had to chip in. A good deal of the time, says Isaacs, it was just the two of them walking up the same hill, over and over again.
Anderson, an enthusiast for personal growth, has her own take on it.

“To get to a place where you let go of the resentment, that the resentment doesn’t hound you, doesn’t follow you to the end but that you find a way to let go of it, of anger, of fury, of guilt, of shame, into the beauty that is nature and also have any kind of sense of hope, is extraordinary. And to me, that’s as much as anything what this film is about. It takes a particular type of human being to be able to get to that place. To be able to forgive yourself.”

As it happens, we are discussing this in the same week that Jason Isaacs’ jaunty observations about the atmosphere on The White Lotus set have gone viral. “[It was like] theatre camp, but to some extent an open prison camp,” he told The Guardian. “You couldn’t avoid one other. There are tensions and difficulties, alliances that formed and broke, romances that formed and broke, friendships that formed and broke.” Cue a frenzy of speculation about who hated whom. Isaacs snapped back that these online detectives had no clues; he just wanted to make it clear that seven months on a set in Thailand wasn’t a holiday.

I wonder what Isaacs seeks in a role at the age of 61. “I get better, the more human and more dimensional the writing gets,” he says. “But now, there’s nothing I look for, just whatever’s interesting to me, where it doesn’t feel like I’m repeating myself, and nice people. Hopefully, talented people. I hope that it’s good for the sake of the people involved.”

Experience has taught him that expectations are pointless. “And also just life, having friends die and thinking ‘I have today, but no more than this’. I’m lucky enough to get to do the job I do, so I remind myself when I’m on set that this is a great day.” Even if, as the man says, it isn’t exactly a holiday.

The Salt Path opens on May 15, with preview screenings this weekend.

Must-see movies, interviews and all the latest from the world of film delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our Screening Room newsletter.