Alison Stewart: This is all of it on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up next week, we will continue our Women's History Month series with a focus on women in music production with Grammy-nominated artist, writer and music educator Patrice Rushen and actor Brian Tyree Henry will join us to talk about his new limited series Dope Thief. Now let's get started with The White Lotus. [music]

In the new third season of HBO's Emmy-winning show The White Lotus, we find ourselves in a jaw-dropping location, in this case, private villas on coastal Thailand, a handful of wealthy, mostly unhappy people, and hotel workers beholden to them, and con men. Yes, there are always con men and women. Tim Ratliff is a middle-aged master of the universe with a languid southern accent. The patriarch of the family, a finance guy who supports his medicated wife, an agro heir apparent son, and two younger siblings searching for their own identities apart from bro and dad.

When Tim comes to White Lotus, his phone won't stop buzzing. Something is very wrong back at the office. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 2: Timothy?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Speaker 2: Is everything okay?

Speaker 3: No. No, it's not. We're on the antipodal opposite ends of the earth from humanity here. It's fine. Nobody comes here. It's day here, it's night there. It's night here, it's day there. I can't get anybody on the phone.

Speaker 2: Who do you need to get a hold of?

Speaker 3: I'm just saying that the time difference is aggravating. You know?

Speaker 2: Poor guy. He works so hard. He needs to calm his ass down.

Alison Stewart: Jason's an acting veteran playing a variety of roles from Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter to a grieving father in Mass. Jason Isaacs joins us in studio. It's nice to talk to you.

Jason Isaacs: Well, it's nice that you found a clip where I'm not sweating. I think that might be the only sentence in all eight episodes.

Alison Stewart: Oh, we try

Jason Isaacs: Well done, you.

Alison Stewart: No swearing on public radio.

Jason Isaacs: Fair enough. I'll abide by any rules you give me.

Alison Stewart: We have a delay, though.

Jason Isaacs: I love the fact that you said "veteran" there, but also middle-aged. I'm thinking, "I'm 61. Will I live to 122?" It's possible nowadays.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: We're just saying that-

Jason Isaacs: I'm following Brian Johnson, you know.

Alison Stewart: -those things vintage.

Jason Isaacs: He wants to.

Alison Stewart: We'll follow him-

Jason Isaacs: He might.

Alison Stewart: -into the sunset. How are you, by the way? Go ahead, tell us. Tell us the story.

Jason Isaacs: I am in the middle of a, as all of us are, in the middle of a publicity blitz for this show. Which seems to need no publicity because everybody in the world, apparently, is watching it. This morning, I did this thing called the BuzzFeed Puppies at the behest of my gorgeous godchildren Marley and Lila in London, who said, "Please, please do the puppies," so I begged. You sit in a little pen and these gorgeous little puppies cuddle you. You are meant to be so distracted by their fluffiness that you can't answer the questions. I was distracted by the fact they were sinking their fangs into every part of my body, and my arm now has a giant gash in it for which I might need some kind of surgery. Oh, multiple gashes.

Alison Stewart: It's big.

Jason Isaacs: The shirt,-

Alison Stewart: That's huge.

Jason Isaacs: -which was designated for the rest of the publicity all day, is spattered with blood. I'm fine but a little bit sore, is the answer.

Alison Stewart: Is Mike White that tough?

Jason Isaacs: Is he a biter?

Alison Stewart: Is he a biter? Yes. Is Mike White a biter?

Alison Stewart: He's not a biter. He's the opposite. Actually, he kills you with kindness. Now, Mike White is an extraordinary man. For anyone who's watching the show, you won't need telling what a brilliant writer he is, but I think his director gets ignored or people forget the fact that he's the guy that brings it to life. As well as imagining it all and writing it all. He directs this-- well, come at another way, my 19-year-old daughter wants to be a film director, and she's directed plays. I was there when someone asked her how she directs actors, and she said, "Well, it's the same with all actors, isn't it? It's got to be a compliment sandwich."

Mike White comes out from behind the monitor from where he has been shrieking with demonic laughter. That's how you know that maybe you'll be moving on because he's just uncontrollable with laughter. Then he comes out and he goes, "Awesome. Great. Neat. Fantastic." Maybe you're going to go again. As he's walking away, turns over his shoulder, a bit like Peter Falk as Colombo for those viewers over 100 like me.

Peter Fault used to come as a detective and investigate people and as he was leaving, he'd go, "One more thing. My wife is a big fan here," so Mike would just throw a little tip over his shoulder. Half a suggestion. You're an idiot if you didn't take it whole and do exactly what he says. He's a magnificent director partly because he's also a great actor. Before he speaks to you, he'll come out from behind the monitor, tell you it was great, and then walk around muttering, playing all the parts to himself.

When he gets to your bit, he kind of frowns, tries it a few different ways, then he comes over and gives the note. In another world, and possibly using AI, he will be playing all the parts.

[laughter]

Maybe season four will all be Mike White, and I, for one, will be watching.

Alison Stewart: You have a good ear for accents.

Jason Isaacs: Well, I'm British, so there's a weird thing that people don't realize, Americans don't realize about British people, English people, particularly, when somebody opens their mouth in England, everybody can place them. I don't mean geographically or that definitely regionally. You can place them socioeconomically. You can hear what kind of education they've had. You can hear how they would like to be perceived and whether they're making their accent a bit more street or a little bit more--

Alison Stewart: Posh.

Jason Isaacs: All those things are apparent to everybody within a syllable, so if you're a British actor, that better be a tool that you can use in order to convey who someone is. Also, you can hear confidence, you can hear braggadocio, you can hear mock conflicts. You can all those things in someone's voice.

Alison Stewart: Did you work with a voice coach for [crosstalk]?

Jason Isaacs: There is a woman called Liz Himelstein who's one of the world's great dialect coaches, she works with a lot of big Hollywood stars, who was available to all of us. Yes, I work with her because I don't just want to be from Durham, North Carolina. Well, the one thing I really didn't want to do was do a wash-up Southern. People I know, friends from the south, hate it when actors do something like a Southern.

There's no such thing as a Southern. Kentucky's different from Alabama, different from Arkansas. This is Durham, North Carolina. He is also a particular guy from Durham. He's old money, he's blue blood money, and the accent in Durham in a certain section of the community, golf club, generally, has two vowel sounds that are English. They're a hangover from the colonial days.

Alison Stewart: Tell me.

Jason Isaacs: It's got a short vowel sound, the "uh" sound. Like instead of not, you say, they say not. They also say, "I know. I'm going." It's a diphthong. When I do it, there was a, for a while there when people were talking about those things on the Internet, there were people saying, "He sounds Australian", "He sounds English." I don't. I sound like the guy from Durham. Some people were going, "No, he sounds like my dad." One guy said, "He sounds like everyone at my golf club."

[laughter]

It's because I'm English, so I come at it from a, I need to build the entire thing, every vowel, every consonant, and the music of it, from scratch. Accents are music. They're not really sounds.

Alison Stewart: Did you build your character based on his ancestry? There is a period when you're like, "My grandfather was the governor."

Jason Isaacs: Sure. There, now we're getting into the grain of it. At that point he's very, very drunk,-

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Yes, he is.

Jason Isaacs: -and heavily drugged out, so people's accents comes out, the action they had when they were young, before they went to business school. For instance, my natural accent, I talked like that when I was a kid. I don't know if you can tell where that's from, but I'm from Liverpool, and that accent I had is very, very posh for Liverpool. I have relatives who talk like that, that order chicken and chips at a shop, you know, but mine was much more refined because I'd had elocution lessons.

Well, I don't talk like that now, but if I get very drunk or very tired or very angry, I do. That's Timothy without his guard up [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: When the puppies get you.

Jason Isaacs: When the puppies get me, yes, believe me. I love voices. I love everything about them. You can hear him disappear deep into himself as well, Timothy. His kids don't have the accent, they will have gone to different schools, and they won't want to sound like their dad.

Alison Stewart: What was it about the role of Tim that pulled you in?

Jason Isaacs: Well, firstly, Mike White is one of the great voices working in screenwriting-

Alison Stewart: He is, yes.

Jason Isaacs: -today on television and on film. It's rare. I've been lucky enough to continue to make a living as an actor since I left drama school in 1988, but I'd say on-- maybe on two hands, I can pick out the projects that were brilliantly written, where people who are just remarkable talents, and he's one of them. The shows are great and the character was an interesting challenge. I get asked to repeat myself often.

I often get asked to play one-dimensional moustache-twirling villains, and I walk away from those always, but I get asked to play parts that are similar, and I don't get asked to play people like Tim who don't speak much. I like words, and I can do a lot with words, and I didn't get much to do in this. I knew, also, like a great torch song, Tim's journey really happens at the end. There's a volcano of steam building up for him. I read it and I thought,-- "There's some great and difficult stuff coming. I suppose if I'm being completely candid, I did it because I was scared that I couldn't pull off the things that Mike had written of me coming up.

Alison Stewart: What was scary?

Jason Isaacs: Well, I don't want to tell you what's coming up in the episode.

Alison Stewart: Tried. [laughs]

Jason Isaacs: So far, I get to be drugged up, and my entire world, everything about my ego, myself, my sense of self, is imploding. In fact, the world seems surreal to me. A bit like when someone dies. I don't know if you've had this, but when someone close to you dies, you go around in your life and look at other people and you go, "Why are you behaving normally? How is everybody continuing as if things are just usual?" Well, for Tim, he's looking [chuckles] at his wife, his mad wife and his crazy kids, and they're all talking about what their plans are for the future, what Piper's going to do, and I'm thinking--

Alison Stewart: They have no idea what's going on.

Jason Isaacs: No idea that our entire world evaporates when we get on that boat, when we leave. He's trying to work out what, if anything, to do about it, and who is he if we are not the things we have and the things other people think about? It was a challenge. I said to Mike when he offered me the job, "I don't know how to play someone for that many episodes who's just out of his mind on drugs and running through these scenarios in his head, but how can I share them with the audience and make it interesting?"

My brother's a psychiatrist, so I said, "Jeff, what happens when you take handfuls of lorazepam?" He went, "Well, you fall fast asleep," and I went, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna do that." [chuckles] I go, "What happens if you don't fall fast asleep?" He goes, "Well, you're very sleepy and boring," and I went, "Again, give me third options." It was a challenge. How can I make it clear that the man's-- these drugs are not working and inside his head is a raging volcano? Then, as an actor, can I pull off what Mike has imagined for me? You'll be the judge of that in a couple weeks time.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Jason Isaacs. He stars in the new season of The White Lotus as the stressed out finance dad Timothy Ratliff. Before everything goes bonkers,

[laughter]

when we first meet him, what's important to him?

Jason Isaacs: Oh, status. I mean, first of all, life is easy for him. I got myself a little bit plump. He's a fat cat. He has the entire world at his disposal. It's generational wealth. The entitlement goes back forever, probably to the Mayflower. Where he is, there are statues to him. If there aren't, there will be. What's important to him is his kids. Can this dynasty continue? I've got Patrick Schwarzenegger, the lovely Patrick Schwarzenegger, playing the awful Saxon, my son.

Alison Stewart: He's awful.

Jason Isaacs: Awful. He wants to be like his dad, but he isn't. He's trying, but it's not quite landing. Then there's the other two, as far as Tim's concerned, when he gets there, the other two losers who are not making it the way he wants them to be. They're not fighting their way in the world the way they could be, but has

Alison Stewart: Did he have to fight his way?

Jason Isaacs: No, he didn't have to fight his way. He thinks he did. It's all testosterone and braggadocio with him. What's important to him? I don't know. He's worried about his wife. Who wouldn't be? Take a look at her, like the way she's behaving. They lost each other a long time ago, she's drugged out of her mind, so things aren't going that great to start with, but the world is falling at his feet. It's all disposable income, and it's unlimited.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. You have to do a lot of acting while you're on the phone.

Jason Isaacs: I do. [chuckles] Thanks for noticing that. It's not easy. There was no one there and no one on the phone. One of my first jobs out of drama school when I-- Sorry. Yeas, when I was out of drama school, but when I left to university, it was when Thatcher and Reagan had just deregulated the world of finance and so everybody was getting recruited to be commodity salesmen or currency traders or whatever.

All of my friends, people who'd done a macrame degree, it didn't matter what you did, you were suddenly given a Porsche and giant shoulder pads and a bunch of money. I went to drama school instead. When I came out of drama school, I got a job in a show set in the kind of Wolf of Wall Street world. I knew those people. I'd been to college [unintelligible 00:12:43] I went to watch them. [chuckles] I watched them get their giant houses and their cars and lose them and watch the inner linings of their nose dissolve and all the rest of it.

I learned to do phone acting because so many of my scenes were on the phone. Traders were on the phone all the time, and there was no one on that phone, so I thanked God that that was one of my first jobs 35 years ago. You're right, a lot of my acting is on the phone in this, and it's no fun. Then months later, when the show was finished, I was back, and I was on the phone in my house with the different actors who play people at the other end.

In fact, I went to Scott Galloway's apartment here in New York, who is not an actor, and I spent hours with him, and he had a slow realization that he's one of the world's great podcasters and a brain the size of the planet, but there's a little bit more involved in acting than he'd first thought.

Alison Stewart: One of the hotel's policies is to give up your devices. Why doesn't Tim want to comply? I think it's because he has issues with being told what to do.

Jason Isaacs: Well, he lives his life on the phone. The market moves very, very quickly. You need to know what's happening. For instance, if we imagine that President Trump was in office, one-half a comment on Air Force One, suddenly the world's markets turn around overnight. Most trades nowadays, it might be-- surprise people listening who don't know much about the stock market, I don't know or care much about it, but billions of trades a second are done by supercomputers, so it's very rare that human beings are involved in lots of trades anyway. You can't be off-grid. You can't possibly be off-grid when you're in the world of finance.

Alison Stewart: He does, for a moment, though, give up his phone.

Jason Isaacs: Well, that's because he realizes [chuckles]-

Alison Stewart: He's bad news. [laughs]

Jason Isaacs: -that his entire world has evaporated, and everything that he was is gone, and he doesn't quite know what to do about it. The last thing he wants is anyone else in the family to find out while he tries to work out what to do about it, if anything, if there's anything to be done or is this the last four days of their lives?

Alison Stewart: I was wondering. Is it the kind of thing they're-- that kind of guy, that, "It'll get better." We'll just put it away, someone will fix it, and I'm [crosstalk]

Jason Isaacs: These were discussions with Mike early on. He's a genius, but he's also very collaborative. I had said, "This guy would throw lawyers at it." There are certain people in the world who, when they get in trouble that seems irreversible and bound to bring them down, they just throw lawyers at it for years and the problems go away. They jam up the courts, whatever. Good point. That became part of some of the phone calls. Yes, he does think the lawyer is going to sort things out because the lawyers have always sort of things out. You throw enough money at any problem, when the lawyer comes back and goes, "There's no way out of this one," it's such a shock to him that he turns on the lawyer because certain people can't accept responsibility and turn everything into blame. I don't know who I'm thinking of. I'm sure you can fill in the gaps yourself.

Alison Stewart: His wife seems sort of half stoned-

Jason Isaacs: Half stoned?

Alison Stewart: -all the time.

Jason Isaacs: [laughs] I don't know who you're hanging at the weekends. Yes, his wife is popping pills like a lunatic until I take them.

Alison Stewart: Does she really know what her husband's up to?

Jason Isaacs: I'm not sure she remembers his full name. She doesn't know what's going on most of the time. One of the reasons that Parker is so entertaining in the show is that she has half a toe in reality and nine and a half toes off in the surreal world of Victoria Ratliff.

Alison Stewart: We've had her here. She's a pistol.

Jason Isaacs: Well, I wasn't talking about Parker in real life, although it does-

Alison Stewart: No, she's a pistol.

Jason Isaacs: -apply partly. Yes, that's true.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] I wonder, is there a still magnolia to her character?

Jason Isaacs: Well, I don't want to say what's coming down the line, but of course, she doesn't have the drugs anymore, so she's bought very, very slowly back up to the surface, maybe too quickly for her, like somebody getting the bends, and the world comes into focus. What was that kind of languid, sleepy energy becomes what those people are like when they don't get their pills. You'll get to see and be entertained by that too.

Alison Stewart: It's funny because your character says, "I don't take drugs," then we see him taking the drugs.

Jason Isaacs: Well, yes. [chuckles]He's not burdened by the responsibility to tell the truth in the world, generally, that's why he got into this trouble. Also, he's all about what other people think about him. He's all about what his wife thinks about him, his children think about him. One of the so many great things about Mike, but choosing to settle in Thailand, it's a place that people go to seek enlightenment, and it's a place that rich people go to buy enlightenment, I think, or spiritual growth.

Of course,-

Alison Stewart: Or hide.

Jason Isaacs: Yes. -none of these people get what they think they want or need, but they get what Mike lines up for them, and fate conspires to strip Timothy down the way Buddhists would have it. To his essential self. I'm not sure that happens to Victoria, but he looks around him at the people who he loves and whose job it is to protect, and rightfully, [chuckles] he fears for how they're going to cope.

Alison Stewart: Actors have to feel empathetic for their characters, even though we might see them as different.

Jason Isaacs: I disagree.

Alison Stewart: You do?

Jason Isaacs: I don't think you have to feel anything for your character. You have to be your character. Are you empathetic for yourself in the morning? Do you ever think about whether you're empathetic for yourself?

Alison Stewart: I'm just me, though.

Jason Isaacs: Exactly. I'm just him. "People go, do-

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Jason Isaacs: -you like him? Do you dislike him? I'm him. I'm him with the things he worries about. The times that he's confronted with. Has he done the right thing or the wrong thing? We do that sometimes ourselves and struggle with it. Mostly, we just do the thing that we do. A bit like, Gladwell, Michael Glawell's-- Michael? Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, we make our decisions and then we rationalize or we find some confirmation bias to allow us to feel comfortable with those decisions.

Even those people who seem to us brutal, some of the worst people in the world to us who make immoral decisions and-- are people who just have a different view of the world, that it's Darwinian. Nobody judges a lion for eating a wildebeest at the watering hole. There are people who are crushing or brutal or feel like that is the way of the world.

Alison Stewart: You understand why he hate it, though.

Jason Isaacs: No, you said "empathize". I need to understand. I need to have all of his thoughts. I need to think like he thinks, I need to worry about things he worries about. That was the challenge for this. I don't speak for so much of it, but I'm thinking like crazy. His mind is like a kaleidoscope off-kilter, and I had to have all those thoughts in my head.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting.

Jason Isaacs: People think when actors cry, they need to think about their puppy getting run over. No, I need to think about the things that are making the character sad, and I need to feel sad.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jason Isaacs. We're talking about The White Lotus. He plays Timothy Ratliff, a stressed out finance dad. New episodes premiere on Sunday nights on HBO and Max. This was a seven-month?

Jason Isaacs: It was a seven-month shoot.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:19:09]

Jason Isaacs: Longer for Mike and Dave and all the rest of the crew who went out there months earlier to scout, but yes, we were there for seven months. We all lived together, cast and crew, in various different hotels. We're all in the same hotel at the same time, we moved a few times, and it was a crucible. Let me tell you, it was a petri dish of human behavior. It was interesting.

Alison Stewart: What was the experience like for you? Some people had ups, people had downs.

Jason Isaacs: Well, everybody had all of them. I think it was some part paradise, some part Lord of the Flies, some part Mean Girls, some part Grease. Summer Camp, Friday the 13th, and the lovely versions. It was all of it. Some part Groundhog Day. It was a lot of people away from home, a long way from home, very, very hot. A lot of stress. Sometimes because you're playing stress people, sometimes because you have too much time off.

It's not like you're going to sunbathe. Once you've had a few massages and been out on a boat, you're no longer tourists. I got out a lot. My wife, oddly, who's never wanted to visit a set before, for some reason, a five-star resort in Thailand seemed more attractive. She came for most of it, which was great, and we traveled a lot and saw some of the much more heartbreaking side of Thailand and some of the wonderful things. Some people didn't leave the environs of the hotel at all, which is interesting.

Alison Stewart: Did you travel for yourself, to relax, to get away from it?

Jason Isaacs: Travel to get away? It was very intense for everybody. There's a lot of alcohol there. Obviously, there's all kinds of other things in Thailand that are illegal and flowed. There are lots of lovely people having a lovely time, but it was not a holiday, and it was not without its own White Lotus behavior.

Alison Stewart: What should we keep our eyes open for Tim? What should we watch for?

Jason Isaacs: What would you do? What is storytelling? It's, what if? Really great storytelling like Mike does is, what if that was me, and what would I do at every point? What are your choices and what's going to happen? The other thing he sets up the not just who done it, but who had it done to them, and why done it, and that's kind of a fun thing. The thing I was thinking, actually, more about the show is that we-- there is a culture of binging shows and some people I know are even just waiting to watch it all the end. It's a terrible shame if you do that because there's a craft in telling stories.

Dickens wrote to be serialized in the newspaper. He wrote specifically to be serialized. He knew how to do that. Mike knows how to use this form, this medium of television, week by week, to tease you and to torment you and to give you that exquisite torture and satisfaction of these things marinating and percolating in you. Watching Tim's unraveling week by week, what would you do? [chuckles] I hope you wouldn't do what I do. Where's he going to take it?

The one thing that Mike does is surprise you always. Those people, spoiler if you haven't seen season two, cover your rears right now. Skip on 10 seconds. The way he killed Jennifer Coolidge was just genius. She got away, she killed all those guys, and then she smacked her head on the side of a boat. He knows both how to satisfy and how to surprise, so hopefully, those things happen. I'll tell you this. I took the job partly because it's Mike, and I'd do his shopping list in dinner theater, but partly because of what's coming up for me.

Alison Stewart: From your taking the role, you knew what happened to Tim?

Jason Isaacs: Yes. No, we all got all the scripts. It wasn't one of those things where they hand you out pages day by day. Weirdly, that we all got the scripts and then when we got to Thailand, they got incredibly secret about the script, and they took us off-- took it off us all the time. When we traveled between islands, we had to hand them all in and get them all back.

It reminded me of the days when I used to get the Harry Potter script, but the day before an NDA would arrive. It would be the size of War and Peace, and I'd have to sign it. I would always sign it Mickey Mouse going, "You do realize the book's been on sale for two years."

[laughter]

There's nothing that secretive in here. Yes, they're very, very secretive about the end. Even my wife who was there said to me, "Did you shoot four or five different endings," and I went, "What planet were you living on? You were there, love." They were secret about it, but yes, we all knew what was coming.

Alison Stewart: The White Lotus can be seen on Sunday nights on HBO and Max. My guest has been Jason Isaacs. It's nice meeting you.

Jason Isaacs: It's lovely to meet you too. Thanks very much.