Jason Isaacs Talks About the Twin Worlds of Awake
Actor Jason Isaacs has probably become best known for his tremendous performances in the Harry Potter films, but he’s also done so much more. He’s had award-winning roles in “The Patriot” and “Black Hawk Down”, he did great work in the television series, Brotherhood, and his role in the tv film “The State Within” earned him a Golden Globe nomination. This week Jason came by the SiriusXM studios to talk about the premier of his new series, “Awake”. Excerpts from that interview appear below.
Ron Bennington: Jason Isaacs, the show premiers tonight, Awake, and there’s such a great buzz on this show right now.
Jason Isaacs: There is, well you know they did something that I don’t fully understand, which is they gave the entire pilot away online. And so millions of people have already seen it and they’ve been going nuts for it, yeah, people have been saying nice things.
Ron Bennington: Well it’s phenomenal writing. And to be able to pull this off on television…cause one of the things they think that you have a problem when you’re doing this kind of show is can you keep up the believability, can it make sense, can you keep everybody involved in it and still stay as complex as the idea? The idea is both simple and complex at the same time.
Jason Isaacs: True, well I mean the premise of it is very simple, it’s just how do you make great television every single week for an hour at a time. It’s ah, for those people who don’t know, it’s about a detective Michael Britten who I play, who has a terrible car accident at the beginning of the series, with his wife and his son in the car, and he wakes up and his wife has survived and they’ve lost their son, and he goes back to work. And when he closes his eyes at night, he’s instantly in another world where his son has survived and his wife has died. And he goes to work with a different partner, and solves different crimes. One of them must be a dream, stands to reason, but he has no idea which one. They both seem completely realistic. He doesn’t want to tell people he’s going nuts, but he does start behaving strangely at work. He has insights into crimes and into people’s behavior that allow him to solve things, and his boss in both worlds sends him to a police shrink to check that he’s safe to carry a gun. And only the shrinks really, and the audience obviously, understand quite what’s going on inside my head.
Ron Bennington: Now as a man, the two things in life that you demand is to not bury your wife and not bury your kids.
Jason Isaacs: Yeah, well losing a child…I have a wife and children and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me saying losing our children would be a lot worse than losing a partner. It’s unimaginable losing a child.
Ron Bennington: Right.
Jason Isaacs: But losing either, is you know, is not something on top of your wish list. And so what he does, not consciously, but unconsciously, is create a world in his head. He lives in denial, where he just hasn’t lost anyone. And that’s the central hook of the show, and really, you know, what we want to do and really intent on doing, apart from making it a procedural, in that you can watch any episode in any order, we wanted to see what would happen if you had a second chance at a marriage, second chance at being a parent, because it’s not about loss so much as it is about life. It’s about death, about how should he live his life now that he has a chance to try to do things right and different.
Ron Bennington: It’s the strangest thing about the human condition, that it only takes something like that for you to go “oh, I would have made all the changes. I wouldn’t have taken anything for granted. And yet, as soon as you’re past any kind of tragedy again you fall back into that guy you were before.
Jason Isaacs: You know, it’s funny, you used the word guy. One of the key things I think for this, and it’s written mostly by Kyle Killen who write the pilot, but a lot of it is written by Howard Gordon, who wrote 24 and wrote the X-Files a lot and just created Homeland and he writes men’s drama. It doesn’t mean it’s not for women to watch, but the central character is a guy that likes to fix other people’s problems. He’s a detective. He wants to put the world to rights, he wants to make things good and so he wants to fix his wife. He wants to help her through her grief. He wants to fix his son. And the great central dramatic irony is, of course, he is the one that needs help more than anybody, but he’s never gonna see it.
Ron Bennington: Yeah and that’s like what’s great about the title Awake is that most of the time we’re just going through life. We’re just doing the things, particularly if you have skills and you’re good at it. If you’re good at it, then you can kind of turn off this part of you that feels things.
Jason Isaacs: Well you look outside yourself. And he’s sent to these shrinks, he doesn’t want to be there, he certainly doesn’t want to think or talk about his feelings. He wants to talk about other people’s problems so that he can solve them. And that’s certainly, I don’t know about anyone listening, but that’s what I tend to do and that’s what we all tend to do.
Ron Bennington: Right.
Jason Isaacs: Look, the reason I did this is to show, really I wasn’t looking for a job, I was developing something as a producer, oddly, and I read it and I just couldn’t get it out of my head, the imaginative journeys that we could take with this character and we do end up taking during the season. It was too much for me, I just couldn’t say no and walk away because it’s not often that you get a combination of a great idea and some really talented writers and a very talented director. Our series director directed most of Friday Night Lights which I think was a great show, and a show that has, you know appeals to the heart and the brain. And I wanted to walk away because I think my idea is really good and would have made a good series, but I just couldn’t, you know I don’t know how often these things will every come my way.
Ron Bennington: I mean, obviously, you couldn’t tell the audience yet but do you guys know the arc of this story, do you know where you’re gonna take it?
Jason Isaacs: Yeah I know where we want to take it, but also there’s some sleight of hand at play here. I’m an amateur magician, and I recognize misdirection when I see it. If you watch the pilot, which is a premise pilot, I mean it’s got a plot in it, a self-contained plot, but none the less, it sets out our stall. You might be forgiven for thinking that the series will be about finding out which world is real. But our plan is you get so invested in my relationship with my wife, and my relationship with my son, that like me, like the character, you don’t want either one to go away. And what you enjoy, what you’re entertained by and provoked by, is the journey. And the journey is what we’re on and it’s not about the destination.
Ron Bennington: And it really is like alternate universes, even if he’s invented it. These things are, both places are treated like a reality, there’s not one that’s like having dream reality where weird things happen.
Jason Isaacs: No. Yeah there’s some crazy shit that does start happening down the pipe. And what happened was, as we found our feet… You now we start, I solve crimes because I unconsciously pick up on things or subconsciously pick things up as a detective and in the other world, they’re made manifest. So any time I’m in a situation, as Britten, I’m thinking am I making this up, is this really happening, how does it tally so close to the other world. But it’s also true that further down the pipe, the writers really began to find their feet, and let fly, and uh, I don’t want to give anything away, but it becomes much more of a head trip further down the line – for me.
Ron Bennington: So when you’re building a character, are you thinking, like, from the outside in or do you work from the inside out? Where do you start to know when you feel like you’ve got him?
Jason Isaacs: Well the thing about acting is that’s it’s actually a very simple job, it‘s just hard to do. You just have to try and be that person in a situation and with the things that they want, need, feel, hope, fear so you just try and build all the internal pieces. And the stuff that you see from the outside…none of it might be visible from the outside, or it might be just the tip of the iceberg. So when you say something– some people think that acting is saying the words, and for everything that I say in life, there’s a thousand things I was going to say but didn’t. I’m forming things, I’m juggling around from all of my ideas and history and preconceptions, working out what to say, when to interrupt someone. A very well-known playwright in England once said to me “if my characters ever express themselves perfectly they’d stop talking.” So I’m still continuing to ramble on now, because I haven’t really quite managed to communicate what I want.
Ron Bennington: Right.
Jason Isaacs: So, I do all that internal work and then, you know, all great stories start from a what if? And this is what if you didn’t know your dreams were real? What if you didn’t know you were dreaming when it felt like real life. And that’s, you know I think we’ve all done it. I don’t know about you, but I wake up sometimes and some shit’s happened in my dreams and I blame and judge people in real life for it.
Ron Bennington: Well, the beauty too, of the pilot episode is by the end of it he’s saying “I don’t want this to end. I want to keep both these realities. I need both these realities and you totally get it. As a man, you’re watching and you’re like “of course he can’t pick one.” This would, you know this is a Sophie’s Choice.
Jason Isaacs: Imaging lining up, exactly, your wife and your kids with guns and going choose one here. Ah, but we do play with that. He starts off as a guy who says “absolutely, this is the only way I can live my life. It’s fine for me. I have my wife and I have my son.” Well, no one buys a ticket to watch a village of the happy people, so you know, we give him a whole bunch of shit, and it, things get very very tricky for him, in an entertaining way hopefully, and his world begins to fray and sometimes it’s not easy to cope. And there are times when that is no longer the case. He would really dearly like to know which is which because he might need to.
Ron Bennington: What made you decide that you wanted to act? Did you know it at a young age or …
Jason Isaacs: No you know I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. I stumbled blindly. I was at college and I was drunk and I was out of, I was a fish out of water. Everyone else seemed older, more confident, richer and just in every way more assisted in the world. I felt like a child adrift and so I drank, copiously, and I was wandering around this building. It was like fresh week and they were just stealing money from new students to join clubs that would never reappear and there was a sign on the wall that said “can you do a northern accent?” And I’m from Liverpool originally and that was my natural accent and I thought “Fuck this, there’s something I can do” and I wandered into this room and there was a play and I auditioned for it. It was an obscene passage but I was so drunk I had no inhibitions and they cast me and all of a sudden I came to 25 years later talking to you. I don’t quite know what happened but I just fell deep for the process of exploring the human condition.
Ron Bennington: You kind of knew it once you got in there, once you started to do this,
Jason Isaacs: I never even thought about it. I just did a play, I did another play, I was studying law, I did another one, I needed more of it, I just needed to keep doing it because I loved it. You know, I’m a slightly obsessive personality, I was like that about skateboarding. You know I can be like that about cupcakes if not careful. I just, I loved the process. You get in a room and you start working out why people do the things they do. What makes us tick and explore, getting to walk in other people’s shoes who are not like yourself. It’s a very very overwhelming and addictive process.
Ron Bennington: And yet most people would think of it as memorizing lines.
Jason Isaacs: I don’t even look at the lines. Actually I literally don’t even look at the lines ever. I get there on the day and I know what the story is and I understand my place in the story and what’s happening to the character and I glance at the words and they either sink in or they don’t. If they don’t I often change them.
Ron Bennington: Awake is the premiere episode tonight, and it’s got everybody talking.
Jason Isaacs: Well listen I hope people give it a try, because what it is, is Bob Greenblatt who runs NBC now, swinging for the trees. He ran Showtime and supervised all those great shows that put Showtime on the map and there aren’t shows like this on general network TV, and some critics have said to me “we love your show but we think it’s too smart for the American audience” and I think that’s an insult. American audiences are really smart and able to, not only to follow, but engage with complex stories. I hope they give it a shot because people who’ve given it a shot generally have liked it.
Ron Bennington: Tonight, 10 o’clock in the East, 9 pm Central on NBC, you can check it out if you even want to watch right now, go to NBC.com slash Awake. Thanks so much for coming in.
Jason Isaacs: Thanks for having me
Ron Bennington: Congratulations with everything and continued luck. See you next time through.
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You can hear this interview in its entirety (as well as many others) exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? You can click here for a free trial subscription. For more information on Ron Bennington Interviews, click here. You can find out more about Awake at their official website on nbc.com.
