Somehow, Jason Isaacs is a compelling, magnetic actor despite the fact that he is nearly always the villain.
It's almost perplexing - I am most drawn to Jason after recently bingeing the entirety of The OA, where he plays a conflicted doctor keeping five grown adults captive in his basement and performing sinister experiments on them. Then there was 2015's Stockholm, Pennsylvania, where he also played a captor, this time of a little girl. Before that was his ten-year tenure as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series and Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot.
How can I find myself so drawn to his performances, you ask? Well, there's this:
But Isaacs also has the ability to find - and portray - the humanity in even the worst of the characters he plays. In a recent interview with Esquire, he says, Well, at the risk of inevitably sounding pretentious, I've never played a villain. I don't take the job unless I can find a way to make the man human, and to justify it.
Which isn't to say he agrees with all his characters choices, of course - but he does a damn good job creating compelling pieces in even the worst of humans - and the accompanying commanding power his character possess makes his damn near irresistible. It's weird, I know.
The Brit also has a knack for accents, like the Southern one he did as a malicious prophet in Sweetwater. For some odd reason, though, I felt he'd really found the pinnacle of his charisma as a doctor - no matter how delusional he might have been. The OA had only one shirtless scene on Hap's part, but with a likely second season, we hope that just might change.
