Most actors, especially the male, British ones, will crack a few self-deprecating jokes in an interview, if only for form’s sake. Call it the Hugh Grant legacy. Jason Isaacs does this often enough to make you think he may actually mean it. “I just think I’m rubbish,” he says at one point. Then, later: “I can’t believe people don’t go, ‘I’m so sorry, we’ve made a terrible mistake for the last 30 years. Please go and open a cake shop.’” As regards his casting in The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s splendidly bleak new comedy about Soviet power struggles, he is even more down on himself: “I was pretty sure that Armando had got the wrong address, that he was sending the script off to Jason Bateman or Jason Statham. Presumably, someone more expensive wasn’t available.”
No one who has seen The Death of Stalin could believe that for a millisecond. This is a film stuffed to the Kremlin rafters with covetable comic roles, each one performed with the deadly precision of a Red Army sniper, yet Isaacs, as the Soviet war hero Georgy Zhukov, is the most riotously enjoyable of all. Zhukov doesn’t even turn up until halfway through, but, when he does, he makes an entrance, as Isaacs puts it (and there really is no other way), “like a big, swinging dick”.
Isaacs hasn’t done much comedy before, but in a career that began in earnest with Lynda La Plante’s 1992 ex-squaddie series, Civvies, he has played a lot of sinewy, tough guys who know how to get stuff done. There was Jackson Brodie in the BBC’s Case Histories series, Major Briggs who leapt out of a helicopter and decked Matt Damon in Green Zone – and the unusual, and excellent, Channel 4 drama Scars, in which he used verbatim transcripts from a real-life violent criminal as his script. Most recently, he followed in the footsteps of childhood heroes by becoming a Star Trek captain in the new series Star Trek: Discovery. “I was an original series fan, what they call ‘TOS’ in the biz. Kirk represented everything that a man was or ought to be. He was brilliant, fearless, mischievous, flirty. He was swaggering. But then Spock was the other side of me, too, which was cooler, cautious and sarcastic.”
That other side sometimes gets on-screen expression in Isaacs’ second speciality: ever-so-slightly camp villains, whose moustache-twirling is always counterbalanced by believable motivation. Over time, Harry Potter’s Lucius Malfoy, The Patriot’s Col Tavington and Captain Hook from the 2003 version of Peter Pan have all taken on a life beyond the films they appeared in. “Peter Pan didn’t do very well at the box office at all, but people who have got little kids phone me all the time and go: ‘I’m so fucking sick of seeing your face. My daughter’s been playing it all weekend.’ It’s a beautiful film.”
Both these Isaacs traditions are incorporated in the irresistible Zhukov, who doesn’t so much steal scenes as extort them with marvellous menaces. Isaacs says he created the effect of a “physically imposing man, which I’m not”, with a padded jacket. The real key to the character’s creation, however, might be that accent. In Iannucci’s oddly plausible version of the mid-20th century USSR, no one speaks in the cod Russki you get in a bad historical drama, or even the received pronunciation you get in a good one. Steve Buscemi’s Khrushchev has a Brooklyn accent, Jeffrey Tambor’s Malenkov has a California one and Paul Whitehouse as Mikoyan is cockney. Only Isaacs uses an accent that’s markedly different from his natural speaking voice. “In real life, Zhukov was the only person who was able to speak bluntly to Stalin,” he says. “So, I thought, well, who are the bluntest people I’ve ever met in my life? They’re all from Yorkshire. The accent is shorthand for: no fucking around, I’m going to tell you what’s what. I had a picture of [Kes PE teacher] Brian Glover in my head. Magnificent actor.”
Yet even this aspect of Isaacs’ talent is rooted in his surprising diffidence. The first accent he ever faked with serious intent was the one he needed to fit in at a new school, after his family moved away from the Jewish community in suburban Liverpool where he and his three brothers were raised. “Everybody took the piss out of me when I got to London. I couldn’t understand why, but I went full Ray Winstone. Then I went to university and they all sounded like Hugh Grant and, within a day, I sounded like them, or as best I could. I still have that social disease and I’m not aware I’m doing it,” he says with a grin. “But, luckily, I’ve been able to sell it.”
Isaacs comes across as a man who can appreciate the absurdities of the entertainment industry. And with that face, seemingly carved by the gods for the purpose of twinkly eyed, sardonic smiles, it would be sad if it were otherwise. There are moments when he catches himself on set “standing in a kind of paint-on body suit, saying, ‘Energise!’, looking at Klingons, people with giant rubber buckets on their heads”, and struggles to take himself seriously. “It’s often absurd, but then I’m not quite sure what else I could do.”
It’s not that real-world Isaacs is more conflict-averse than his confident, commanding characters. It’s just that his own style of confrontation tends more towards arch than bluff. He has long been a keen tennis player, but has recently found a new downtime hobby: baiting bad-faith Star Trek fans on Twitter. “I am the recipient of an awful lot of trolling from rightwing hate groups hiding behind some bizarre pretence of being fans,” he says, settling back into the sofa with a relaxed smile. “They say they’re not going to watch it because I make anti-Trump pronouncements. Then I click on their timelines and it’s nothing but white supremacist stuff.”
It doesn’t intimidate him, clearly. When Sean Spicer made a surprise appearance at the Emmys, Isaacs was one of the first to call bullshit, with a funny and forthright Instagram post from the Netflix afterparty, in which he compared Trump’s former press secretary to Goebbels. He could refuse to engage with the Twitter trolls, but he says: “I kind of love their passion. I love when they hate the show, or they say they hate the show and it’s always for some minute technical detail. It’s exciting to be at the centre of those kinds of scholarly rows.”
Isaacs is a thoroughly clubbable chap who manages nonetheless to maintain an outsider’s perspective. During The Death of Stalin’s shoot, for instance, he was given a day off to give a reading at the battle of the Somme centenary and found himself hobnobbing with world leaders. “I was talking to David Cameron and when I told him what I was doing, he could barely contain his surprise and horror and joy at how the film’s story paralleled exactly what was going on in Downing Street. There’s no message to the film, but you get from it that politicians seeking power should almost by definition be precluded from obtaining power. They’re all so venal and self-serving and immature and ruthless.”
Presumably, Cameron didn’t use those words? “He didn’t say things that were very far from it! He was watching Boris – having stabbed him in the back – being stabbed in the front by Gove, and then everyone else stabbing Gove until Theresa May was the last woman standing. The blood was fresh.”
Only, of course, as Isaacs points out, The Death of Stalin wasn’t written with the Brexit bloodbath in mind. Or Trump’s White House, or Putin’s new politburo, or any other specific modern-day parallel. “That’s Armando’s gift for political satire. You could have released this film at any time in the last 100 years, and probably release it in the next few hundred years, provided Trump doesn’t annihilate us all, and it would seem perfectly apposite.”
This week, though, when we think about the powerful, their abuses of power and the ways in which others may enable these abuses, we are thinking mostly of Harvey Weinstein. Like many in the industry, Isaacs is sincerely hopeful that the scandal will mark the end of a dark era. Like many asked to comment, however, he still seems to be grappling with what exactly that would mean in practice. It was perhaps in this well-meaning, flummoxed state that he recommended young women adopt “smart rules of engagement” in a recent red carpet interview. He is keen to clarify what he meant: “[That] isn’t victim-blaming or victim-shaming, which I was accused of [after the interview]”.
Today, though, Isaacs has another take, one that combines the accumulated wisdom of his three decades in the movie business with a Soviet courtier’s analysis of systemic corruption: “I think women need to be behind the camera, holding the pen and the purse-strings, too. What I wouldn’t recommend, for my daughters or any young men, is to be waiting for the phone to ring, to be picked because of what you look like, or the feeling that people get when you walk in the room. Control the story yourself.”
Isaacs’ own career has included the occasional producer credit and he says he’ll direct if and when a script makes him want to “call in all my markers”. In truth, though, it’s not his leadership skills that mark him out. He’s treasured as a team player par excellence, whose combination of self-aware skill and collegiate good humour can elevate even the most ordinary film into an all-time favourite. Jason Statham is great, but he can’t do that.
The Death of Stalin is released in the UK on 20 October
