Hi everyone, It's Sophia and welcome back to work in progress. Today's guest is Jason Isaacs, remarkable actor, philanthropists and someone who makes me laugh every day at work. I'm gonna guess that you already know Jason. If you don't know him as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, you might know him as Captain Hook and Peter Pan or Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot, or Hap in The o A. When we first met Trust that I fan girl to him about that show. Perhaps you've seen him in his latest tour to force film mass or maybe you know him the way I know him best as my TV dad, Dr Rob Griffith on Good Sam. Jason's coming awfully long way since his first appearance in Mel Smith's The Tall Guy In Originally from Liverpool, Jason and his family moved to London when he was a child, where he experienced his own injustice that shaped his outlook and no doubt influenced the legacy he wants to leave on the world around him. You might have heard, but Jason has been an incredible supporter of the British Red Cross. With his ultimate Harry Potter quiz that raised seventy eight thousand dollars just last year for the Red Cross. He's visited refugee projects to learn how the Red Cross is helping over half a million refugees rebuild their lives, and he works constantly to destigmatize their experience by lending his platform to their voices. Whatever he's doing. Throughout his career of well over a hundred films, he has been an advocate for those who feel inferior, for those who have been marginalized, and for those whose voices are not being heard. For someone who often plays a villain, Jason Isaacs is an incredibly caring and deeply empathetic human being who I am so glad to call my real life friend and my make believe dad. We're going to find out more about his life, his career, and his incredible work right here, right now. And we had such a good conversation that we've actually decided to break this up into two episodes. Enjoy. You know, And it's weird you're not talking on microphones. I know it is weird. I think I can look at you. It's funny to be first of all, it's funny that we're sitting in my living room where we've sat before, but with microphones, and it's weird. I know I was saying this to you before I turned the recorder on. But other than you and Sky, I haven't interviewed anyone in person since. But you know something, that's my favorite bit of when we lived in California. So I lived into Pango outside you know where it is, but but it was about a forty five minute dry to take the kids to school, and we have these amazing conversations because we weren't looking at each other. And when you look at someone, if I sit down my teenage kids now there, they wouldn't sit down, but it would be a three second conversation. But in a car you can do it. And somehow, maybe remotely, you can have conversations because you're not looking at someone. I might have to my chair away from you, like in a therapist. I'm just gonna I'm just gonna turn my chair away because it's weird. It's already a weird dynamic that in all interviews are weird on there because I always want to apologize to journalists afterwards and go if I meet you socially, I'll just listen to you all night because it's one side, and you know, notionally you're meant to do all the talking, and you try and make it social and normal, but that's not normal, it's just rude. Well, you can ask me things if you want to. I will. Nothing's really nothing's really after something. So you're so good at the social stuff. I watch you navigate your way around all the social media, and I have many friends who do it. But some stuff is off. So everybody has this version of I'm going to share what I think confeeling to share, even if I've mental health issues, or will Smith and his family sit down and pour out their marital issues and stuff? What's private? What did we you know? So what version of the do we share with the public and what do we keep? I know, it's really it's tricky to figure those things out, especially because if you have nothing that is sacred, you have nothing that is yours. But then I know, for example, you brought them up, you know, I know how revolutionary watching Jada show Red Table Talk has felt to me, and the way that they've been able to usher certain conversations into households. I think he's so incredible and and recently when he was on his book tour, something clicked for me, and I wonder if it might resonate with you. I looked at him and I went, oh, they're in their teaching stage. They had a privacy stage, and now they're they're in a teaching stage. And I know that as an individual, I've gone through so many stages, and I know there's more stages of my life to come. And I wonder if maybe some stages you want to be deeply private and some of them you want to shout from the rooftops. I don't know. I think it's unquestionably to the right that then exposing themselves, peeling all the layers back, it's incredibly helpful to people watching. There's no no And you and I both know Este Perel, who I think it's magnificent, and her podcasts where couples come and have kind of all their therapy, is incredibly helpful, useful to people listening. I'm just saying that you and I are performances, so I think it's valuable. What the Smiths are doing is incredible. What they're doing. I just don't want to be that person. So but I'm look, I'm much older, new I sometimes have to remind myself that I'm playing your dad because I'm actually old enough to be your dad, which is odd because we're empoies. But I still feel and it's ludicrous to hang onto things that just aren't going to reverse. But I still remember how much I worshiped those actors that seem so enigmatic to me that I only saw on screen, and whose private lives. I knew nothing about their sexuality. I knew nothing about their what income brackets they came from, you know, whether they did Roberts, you know his father being a well off painter and stuff, you know, just anything about the character. I wanted to suspend my disbelief watch them on screen and think they could be anybody they pretend to be, and and as an actor, I still kind of fantasize that that ought to be the case. I don't want people even to hear me talking this accent it, since I play Americans so often, I don't want to be watching, Oh he's putting on American accent um. But I think it's just it's ludicrous. That just isn't the way the world works. Yeah, it's all true, and none of it's true, and it's all happening simultaneously, and it's so confusing, and I do I try and chair if I don't know, I don't remember what to do with social media. I don't know who to be on it. Um. I do think people are given comfort and strength when you pull the curtain back on us and you show them that you are also scared or unsure or a bunch of other stuff. Um. It feels like that's a mission, that's a vocation. So why before the pandemic, I used to go around to conventions around the world because I've been in so many different fantasy films and it will be very easy to sit there and sign autographs or whatever, and and make people feel like they've met one of their I don't know superheroes, well, it was people they placed on a pedestal, And I always have felt it's my mission in that one minute to make them realize that I'm just an idiot who forgets to take the bins out, put some makeup and funny voices, and don't deserve any more space in the world than they do, because that can happen. So I do think social media is useful for that, but not when you want people to watch us and believe that we are father and daughter surgeons, for instance, they know too much about us. Yeah, I think there has to be a bit of a balance. You know, I'm not a person who puts a ton of my private life out in the world. For a long time, I didn't put any of it out in the world, which you know, as you know, lead to such It always leads to the rumor mill where you go, am I dating that person? That would be cool? Um? Wow, I didn't know that. My god, this money that no one ever told me about. Where is it? The Internet says I have and where is it? Um? I think what's been powerful for me about the space is the ability to connect unexpectedly and you know, as you said, what you can create when you're a person with a platform. And I think that's even an interesting term because listen, if someone listening has, you know, an account with five followers who are their friends, they have a bigger platform with those five people than I ever will. Um. But I think when you when you sort of are willing to spend the privilege of a platform with some honesty, maybe even some radical honesty, what's been very cool for me, you know, talking about anxiety or navigating mental health or trying to figure out my place in the world as a woman and a creative And I meet people, you know, at at the conventions we do, and they say, you know, I read this thing that you wrote, this post that you shared, and I realized, if you struggle with that, I'm not weird because I struggle with it if it happens to you, Like, why wouldn't it happen to me? Sure, if I'm not in any way questioning the value of that's what we do in art, telling fictional stories as well as the factual stories about ourselves. I'm just saying that I I feel odd about doing it. I'm really glad other people do it and I do do it sometimes. It's one of the reasons though I have no idea who to be on Twitter or Instagram and over those things, because on the one hand, I was railing against Donald Trump for a long time and trying to persuade people to see the truth of what was going on and other political things. I work for some of the charities and have trying to make people see refugees of the human beings and not parasites or whatever, just to dispel the myths and and then I meant to promote things that I'm in and then I want to make really stupid jokes. You know, I want to post ridiculous gifts as well. And I think, you know, if there's hundreds of thousands of people waiting for some sense that they're not alone politically, they don't want to read my pums. And if there's people who want Harry Potter gossip, they don't want to be told that most of Afghanistan is starving right now and could do what I help. You know. So I'm not quite sure which of my multiple personalities to be. I'm not either, But what I lean on all the time is I'm a complete person. And if I was draw a part of myself, not necessarily on social because again there's things I don't share there, but if I withdraw a part of myself, I'm just turning my back on part of myself. I'm making myself smaller. And you know, we talk about this. I live in a very mean head. I don't need any more encouragement to be small, and then the engouragement from my own brain. But I'm fascinated just by the it, the duality and the opposition and the juxtaposition even in what it means to be an artist and to try to make art, to be unknown so that you can be anyone, but also to be known enough that you get to play people. There is a paradox in that I would do back to back independent movies, uh in disguise if I possibly could, because I come from that tradition where which is nonsense, by the way, but it's a tradition where you think, well, every time I act, I should be unrecognizable from part to part. Where does that come from? That's the kind of European you know, camouflage, chameleon, notion of Olivier putting faint noses on and finding different voices and walks. It's nonsense. It's not true. Your job has been the story to life. It doesn't matter if you're the characters could have grown up in the same block as some other characters you played one time. But I I felt the struggle right form the beginning of I don't want to be a show off. I don't want people to look at me. I don't want to do a job or a hobby, which is about, you know, the kids standing on the table doing the tap dance. So I always felt like want of the stories when I started, the stories to be so powerful that they grant people and they made them phone a helpline or change their life, or treat people differently, or questioned the lives. And that, of course, isn't how a career works out. Plus that very thing you just said, you don't get the opportunities to tell interesting, good stories that you think you know put something great in the world unless you have a profile, which means unless you've got yourself a little bit famous, or finance herbal which involves doing a bit of standing on the table and tap dancing, which is so there's a kind of playoff between the two. The simultaneous truth we each truth is the opposite of the other. Is something confusing. But it's interesting that you say that you didn't want to be looked at, because that's how I feel now. I really want the stories we tell to have eyeballs on them, because I think that they make people think, and I think they are the types of stories that can make you smarter, kinder, perhaps more tolerant, perhaps more willing to listen to another person. And yet when I am not at work, my nightmare is to have my picture taken my like, there's nothing more jarring than being sort of stopped in the middle of doing something. I'm like, me, what I want to, like, crawl back into my little hole. I don't understand it. And people find that so funny because they'll say to me, but you're on camera for a living. I'm going yeah. But as someone else about the fact that people think that public speaking, which is most people's worst fear. They'd rather die than speaking public. They think that actors should be able to do it, whereas in fact, we're telling stories that other people have written and were interpretive artists. They've created the world, and other people aren't expected to be great. But I'm expected to be great if I find it crippling, Lee, I'm myself crippling, me self conscious if I'm just meant to talk to a table of twelve people at my own birthday party because I feel like it ought to be a great speech. This is why you wanted me to do your e PK with you the other day, isn't it press? I find easy. That's you know, the only thing that's hard for me. I've been doing it so many decades onl than you. If someone asked me a question to which there is a decent answer. It's just normally a story that I've told a thousand times. And if for whatever the you know, contingent of fans are still sticking around, they're like, oh, not that again. No, And he told it exactly the same way. I'm not even sure if they're true anymore. They're just things I've dusted off because they are the answers those questions, the places you come from. That's that's actually the place I normally like to start with people, Because you're right, there are people who have been present in your career. There are people who have found you through a variety of avenues and performances and who follow what you're doing and who are very excited about it. We we all at work comment on this sort of magnificent in tensity of the excitement of the Harry Potter fandom meeting the one Tree Hill fandom in our in our show. And obviously it's just one thing, but I am curious about where it started. It's not lost on me that so many people know you as a character from a film, from a TV show, from a series of films. Maybe it's a blockbuster, Maybe it's an independent. Maybe it's a fantasy, but I always like to know who people were before, and I really, I must say, perhaps with you more than anyone. I'm very curious to hear your answer when I ask you, I just because you know what it is. We've done so much backstory about my character's childhood with you, and granted that's make believe, but we've talked a lot about each other's families. But you've talked to me a lot about your experiences as a father. I've talked to you a lot about my experiences as a daughter. I don't know who you were when you were a little boy. I don't know if there's a beautiful film called Petite Mammal but we watched which is so gorgeous about little girl getting to know her mom's a little girl when he was listening. You should watch it. I don't you know that I don't really know. I'm I grew up in Liverpool and those people who have a really canny here might be able to hear the odd vowel sound buried under there, but I think only me come with this a slightly different angle. So I've played lots of real life people in my life quite a few soldiers in black all down and other things, but also um whatever, politicians and just the football is for various people, and sometimes I've got to meet them, sometimes I haven't. Sometimes I speak to them, and I've found it to be the case that you get a much clearer, more honest, emotional picture of the I don't know infrastructure or forced the subterranean forces in people by talking to everyone else. I don't know that anyone really knows themselves very well. I don't know that people can describe themselves well. I'm reasonably about articulate verbos. So you know, I can talk about myself. Whether it's real, whether it's an accurate self analysis or not, I don't know. It may be a story I've told about myself to myself. Um So when it comes to like how did you why are you an actor? How did you get into acting? I have this narrative of um, a little boy who never quite felt comfortable, although other people who knew me saying I seemed incredibly confidence. So I don't know that that's true. But I was very self conscious and always managed to fake being whatever I thought other people needed me to be. So I was in lots of different crowds and that that's something. I think it's called code switching nowadays, but that didn't exist. But I was. I was from Liverpool, and I was Jewish, and we moved to London, and I was in a world that was neither of those things. Um, I was in this kind of still Jewish suburban ghetto socially, but I went to school that wasn't And then I started skateboarding and skateboarding professionally when I was fourteen and fifteen, and I would go to the South Bank where I was one of the only white kids, and everybody was very rough and from very different worlds, and I was from and then eventually I went to university. All of these places I had completely different subcultures, and I would be whoever I thought that people I was mixing with needed me to be. Vocally, it's a particularly British thing. But you know, I'd changed my voice enormously. An accident probably changed my character. I was probably acting all those years. So I went to university, and you know, I'm not starting a little. I remember this to be true. I went to university. They all sounded like Hugh Grant to me, or postiate Hugh grant you know that we're all family, and they certainly seemed to me they all have the same clothes, they mean, the same schools. And I wanted to fit in with the people that I was mixing with, and I tried to sound like them. I don't know if I pulled it off or not. I went out and bought second hand clothes to try and look a bit like them. I'm sure I didn't pull any of those things off. And a couple of weeks in drunk because they said we all drank a lot, but I used to drink and take a lot of drugs, and to many ways, I think it's an equalizer, like if everybody's wasted, then there's nothing that separates anyway. I saw a sign from an audition in the union building of the university, and it said, can you do a Northern accent? And the one thing that I've been hiding that I definitely could do was a Liverpool accent. And I went to an audition for this play and somebody cast me into play, and I went to rehearsals whenever it was the next day, and for the first time in maybe my life, I felt completely relaxed about I didn't worry about who I was outside the room when I was pretending to be someone else. So when I was exploring how human beings behaved, what makes them laugh, cry, shout hate? You know it was a new play, and I had the same thing you've seen rear its ugly head on set, sometimes absolute certainty there was only one truth in a scene, and that everybody had to see it, everybody had to perform my way. I just I suddenly found this volcanic passion for telling stories and exploring what human beings like. So who I was and I was young, I don't know. I I there are people who think that they knew a version of me and don't recognize my own descriptions. I think I was always inside my head. My inner dialogue was how are you so comfortable? How do other people just seem to be easily themselves? And I probably pulled off looking like that. One of the strangest things that ever happens to me in my life is when people tell me that I seem incredibly confident, powerful, like I do it all because my experiences, I'm terrified all the time. I wonder how everyone else is being so normal, how they managed to have conversations and what are they texting about? What do people text about? And I feel like I don't do anything every day, like I haven't done anything enormously. I want to say, not intimidated by you because I'm so old. I feel like it's okay that you're different. But I watch you just firing on so many cylinders. The fact that you're doing it while you're insecure or wondering if you're doing all great is a tribute to the fact that you know. Courage is not not being scared, it's being scared and doing it anyway. So you're doing this podcast and you do another podcast with your castmates, you work with us, and you're better prepared than anybody else on the set, which is we may get to have my deliberate anarchy of being unprepared. Um, you have businesses, so you do achieve an enormous number of things fantastically well. The fact that you don't think that you're great while you're doing them is what makes you nice, because if you did think you were great and that you were doing them are brilliantly would be obnoxious. Maybe I would just like to be a little less stressed. But yeah, it's you think you'd be less stressed if you did less. I'm not sure you would. It's not that the doing less, it's that I wish I wasn't the I don't know how to describe it other than to say, you know, the moment before you fall, when you trip and you go oga. I feel like that all day, like oh, the floor is coming all day and it would be really nice to you know, hear you make the list and go yeah, I do that all day and I'm like, this is hilarious. I don't. I don't know anybody who does as many things as you do without feeling what you do. Everyone I know who is driven to achieve in many different areas like you are. It's because of those feelings. That's why. That's what makes people do that much. People who grow up and have a very easy, happy life and wonderful relationship their parents and siblings, they don't become performers, don't achieve that much. They open a cake shop and they go home and they have dinner, and they got to bed at seven o'clock, and you know, they live contented lives and they don't feel the need to achieve. I don't feel the need the drive in order to make their mark, so you don't get one without the other. Yeah, so we just have to be slightly mack. Yeah. I mean, I think I my coping mechanism for feeling like I wanted something to be different. I've wanted to get out in the world and make reshape the world. So it wasn't the one I was living in was to take a lot of drugs for twenty years. I was you know, I took a lot of drugs for twenty years and it really helped for a long time. It was fantastic until it was awful and you know, and ruined my life, and so um yours has been. I'm good. I'm going to do things, and I'm going to do them well, and I'm going to keep doing them, and I'm gonna keep opening pushing open new doors. It's fantastic to watch. I love watching you do it. Sorry, I know it's sickening pretty one listening. It is true. I love that, you know. It just struck me as you said that that I think you and I both are relentless, and each of us has had to figure out where our willingness or are inability not to be relentless is useful versus harmful. Yes, that's true. You put yours into much more constructive things. I find myself obsessed with because I've only done the one thing, you know, acting a little bit of producing, some writing stuff and maybe some directing coming up. But but I mostly because I've done this single thing. I find myself obsessed with moments, even long after I've filmed them or been on stage just uncovering. It's like I don't know, it's like a sketch or something. It's like, you know, or a piece of sculpture. I just it's never quite right and I and it stays in my head. These moments stay in my head, and the writing stays in my head. I think, you know, I can't. I sometimes, as you know, I get obsessed with I want to turn a phrase around, I want and there. We have a magnificent writer on our show, and she's God. I've never worked for anybody who has as open and collaborative. But I still get like a six year old in my head, like you know, tears well up in my eyes. I go, I want to say this instead of this. She lets us anyway, because she's great. If it doesn't ruin things. But I, um, I have a I have an obsessive drive. You're right, and I've channeled it into a single thing. You've channeled into twenty things, which is probably much healthier. I don't know that it is, because it's probably why I feel like I'm I have this sort of sense that I'm k of a lot of things, but not really phenomenal at anything. That's how I feel. That might not be what you'd say to me. Yeah, but who are these people who think they're great when you and me but also they're awful? But in the arts or in any other field, it should be walking around saying I mean, it's very English thing to think. That's very Australian as well. Oddly, the whole tall puppy thing, no one should go I'm wonderful, I'm great. Look at this thing I've done, Isn't it? Isn't it? I don't think it's about the the version of that that's rooted in conceit though. I think I think it's about um for me, because conceited people, I just want to kick in the shin, just like a swift kick with like a pointy mule, you know. Um, But I see people who are beautifully confident, and I think to myself, what must that feel like? Yeah, you know, and and and I usually be easy at night without worrying at all that they that they may or may not have done things. Well, yeah, I mean, you talk about old jobs. I made this movie the summer that I turned twenty three, and like the last week we were on the movie, things really devolved with the director. It was his first feature. The producers, they were like screaming at each other all the time. I was so scared and nervous that it really took me out of my head in terms of being able to focus. In the last week we were shooting the end of the movie, I'm haunted by choices I wish i'd made. And people are like, I loved that movie, and I'm like, well just check cut me out of it, and they're like, we can't. You were the lead of the movie. But it makes me crazy. And it doesn't mean it's real. It doesn't mean but it doesn't mean you know, that's that's the life of an artist. Pretentious thing, but it is true. Nonetheless, I love that yourself deprecating and you call it pretentious, but I do. I do think it is very universal. I think a lot of people experience that. And I'm curious about the ways we channel things, because I know what it's been two not channel my sort of relentlessness into healthy zones like to you know, being fixer upper relationships where I'm determined that I'm the one who sees it differently. In nonsense, that's, you know, terribly common for too many wonderful women. But when you talk about your history and and I so admire the way that you talk about sobriety, in the way that you show up for people, I am curious, if you don't mind telling me about it, how do you go from as you said this, you know, close knit Jewish community. You've you've described yourself as a person who is profoundly Jewish, but not in a religious way. You're your spiritual You think that was probably in an interview with the Jewish newspaper. I mean, maybe really not. I think I grew up doing all of it. You can't separate the religious from the cultural. So I grew up heavily steeped in everything, and then I walked completely away from it. And you know, I missed the songs. I know all the song why was it because I went to I grew up, my parents grew up in the forties, you know, And then and then they were teenagers when the war ended and the Holocaust was revealed to them, and they experienced much worse anti Semitism, I'm sure than I ever have. And and so they had a siege mentality that this notion that everyone was out to get the Jews, and at any point someone would turn on you can really trust anyone at some point would be kicked out of England or whatever, and you're temporary business um. And I inherited quite a lot of that until I started having friends and lovers and partners and children who are not That's just not my life, that was theirs. And so I'm I'm very Jewish in the sense that the world will never let me forget that that's who my background was, and that there are many people in the world still who would kill me or bring me up or burn me for because of my heritage. So I'm so somehow to turn my back on it and say, well, that's just not me, it's not who I am, knowing full well that it defines me in so many other people's eyes. Seems like an abdication of responsibility maybe, And the other thing is really very trivial. I remember the songs, I can read. I can read the language, like you know, I'm so steeped, and I spent so many years and I love just like people love Christmas trees or people love Easter bunnies or whatever. You know. I love all the food stuff that I loved, all the rituals. But I have an on Jewish wife, I have not just children. We don't do any of those things. And so I guess it will fade with me. And so um, when I said I'm profoundly Jewish, what I meant was I'm never allowed to forget. And I don't forget because it feels like walking away from a fight that I'm in. Part of I don't believe in God, for instance, I even get offenders the wrong world, but I stupidly do that thing. Uh of always wanted to bring up faith, abortion, taxes, whatever is most difficult in any conversation. That's what I want to talk about. And God is always at the health of things. Yeah, I think that's why, you know, because I come from a very blended family, were a bunch of Catholics and Jews and Agnostics and you know, a couple of atheists mixed in there, and so it led me down this path growing up with both, you know, practices of religious traditions. As a kid, I was like, but I don't understand they basically say the same thing. Like my analogy when I was young was Okay, your sweaters are different colors, but you're both wearing sweaters. Why are we arguing about sweat? Like this is so stupid? And it it led me to study Eastern philosophy, and I spent my whole senior year in high school studying Islam. I really wanted to understand what is the root of belief for people? And why don't we see that most of our belief is much more similar than different. That's something that fascinates me so much. I might actually be making in television serious about beliefs coming up soon, because I know it's not really possible, but because of what we do for a living, and because you know, who knows what stories we tell next. I kind of think of myself as a pretty blank vessel. And I studied law originally partly, I think because I can see all sides of everything, and you know, people sometimes ask me why do you play all these antagonists or villains, and I go, well, I try not to take the part unless I recognize a human being in it. You know, Lucy's mouth boy being maybe the most high profile. He's a racist, he's an area and then it's not very it's thinly disguised. He's a guy that thinks the world was better when people like he ruled it, and that mixed blood is an offense against some kind of you know, eugenic purity and stuff. And you know it's not far fetched or magical. Um those people. There are people elected that seats all over Europe and the White House for a while who believes in those things. Um anyway, So that the more general point is that I feel like I'm blank, or I can be blank. I can see how anybody could believe anything given their context, given what they're listening to, who they're listening to, what era they grow up in, what the mores of the society they live in is. And that's partly if we tell the truth, if we play characters truthfully without judging them, then people will recognize that. People will go you know, people if not recognize themselves in the character recognize that as a truth about humankind, which is which leads to them understanding each other a bit more. Possibly. I don't know if that's a it's a lofty goal, but I think if we just told the mirror up to nature, you know, you get something as a viewer, even in you know, we're making essentially lighthearted entertainment at the moment. You know, a medical show has high stakes, has tears, has laughter. Um, but if we can do things truthfully, if we can find moments of truth, it makes people feel I think I hope it makes people feel slightly less alone and that their own kind of inner dialogue is not unique. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I would gone into that from God because I can see why people believe in it and want to believe in it. When I grew up, I was told very early on I saw those images I was taking to other sharem interditionally, So you know, I've seen mountains of corpses. They meant nothing to me. They didn't look like people that certainly weren't me. They weren't related to me. But I was told all about the Holocaust and everybody at some point it was going to kick the Jews out, kill them at the same time, we were telling stories a passover of this giant bearded creature in the sky that reached down and smoked Egyptians with all these plagues. And and it's true of Islam, minis true of Christianity and Judaism, that there is this God that if you appeal at the right time, in the right words, maybe every Sunday, every Saturday, we'll lean down and help you. And I was growing up thinking, well, where the funk was he? And as I began to read newspapers ago, where is he now? Where is he when a consonant is blighted with childhood cancer or AIDS or the Armenian genocide or anything like, where is this interventionist God? And people go, well, it's about free will, and you go, but that's not the stories you're telling pretty will. So for me, there's such an inherent contradiction in all those monotheistic religions. I just I don't understand it, but I but my somehow, my mission um as a storyteller is to be able to understand how anybody can believe anything and become anyone. The best way I've ever made sense of it comes back to story because for me my personal belief, having grown up with so many books about so many faiths in my space and seeking out more, is simply that the you know, bearded guy in the sky, I mean the irony that we would think that a god, that god could be gendered. But anyway, we're sitting in a chair like what are we doing? The best way I know to make sense of it for me is all of these stories are metaphors about the way humans can treat each other. We can be vile, we can be cruel, we can be homicidal, genocidal, violent, But at our best we serve, we save, we show up, we give. And who do we want to be? Do we want to be more faithful or more vicious? Pick? And the idea is that every day you can pick to be better. And aside from that idea, I don't really have time for people arguing about it. That's the only sweater I want to wear. No I complete with you. That's the uh. That's so much of what things have crystallized for me in the last few years is um despite what it might look like if you read my Twitter rents when trumpet in power? Is what can I affect and how can I affect. I can act other people around me by being gracious and by trying to act out of generosity and love and not trying to make other people feel worse to myself feel better. And where can I make a difference, And where can I not? If I can't make a difference, don't let it occupy real estate in my head, because it's just rotting stuff in there. But that's I think why you have to round sometimes, and that actually being rooted in that kind of love and showing up for people is why I can speak for myself here why I fought so hard against Trump, because to watch a man in modern times literally copy Hitler's playbook and then have people say that's not what he's doing. Oh no, no, the smart enough deliberately to plagiarize. I think it's an instant, an ugly instinct in all of those plutocrats that that they recognize in all human nature. Is this is an instinct you can play into, which is to tell people if their life isn't perfect, then it's not their fault. It's and then fill in the blank and it could be Mexicans, Jews, women, gay people, immigrants, but it doesn't matter what it is if your life isn't perfect. And I think there was a tribal instinct and has been throughout time that we have to continually monitor. You know, the catchphrase whatever, it is not catchphrase wrong where, but the tagline for Holocaust memorial days always never forget. And it bothers me. Not that it's the wrong tagline, but it it makes people think they're being told never to forget these piles of corpses and the crematory and stuff. It's not that I don't think that's useful. And and sometimes I hear that complaint the Jews want special treatment. So you know, the Holocaust comes up. There's too many films about it, too many documentaries about it. Actually, the only reason to revisit is not to remember the dead, although they should be honored, all dead should be. It's to never forget how it starts and to never do it again. Well, yeah, but if you tell people don't become murderous, genocidal monsters. It's easy if you go, but just remember how it started. It starts with othering, it starts with going. Those people aren't quite like you, believing any tropes, believing any cliches about any particular group of people in my life. At the moment, I sometimes have things to do with the Red Cross. It's great privilege to be around silent seekers and refugees. Britain has a minute, minute percentage of the number of people who displaced in the world. But the ridiculous lies that are spread about them, the notion that people have, even my liberal for proggressive friends, thinking they know who these people are and what they've been through and what they want at the country have arrived at. And it's it starts by going, you know, well, if people aren't looking for a job, then we need to cut them off from welfare. We're not rich enough. Actually we're perfectly rich enough to have a safety net that catches everyone. Have more than enough money. And yeah, and that refugees have come the economic opportunities that have come in just to send money back. And I've met numbers of people who have been kept as sex slaves in Yemen, who watched their family drown, who have you know, to risk their life to get on a floating piece of cardboard to come across the channel because they had an uncle who speaks English, who's in England, and that's the only place that might seem safe because their families are dead. And it's extraordinary the myths that are perpetuated. So for me, never forget. It's never forget how it starts. It starts with jokes, it starts with mother ing, it starts with thinking they're not quite like me. You know, there's a country that that we haven't given vaccines to India or to various other countries, but they don't regard death in the same way. I've heard that they don't regard actually heard it from a very prominent Indian person when I was shooting there. I said, God, it's so shocking being here. I've never seen, and I've read about and I prepared myself, but actually to witness poverty and starvation on this level of places that I've been. You said, but you have to understand, Jason, people view death differently here. And I was thinking, no, I don't believe you. I don't believe that those people I passed today, who I'm sure of starving and dying, view death differently from the way you do. Um. So it's that that never forget for me is never. We must police ourselves continually. How it's dolts, not how it ends. I think that's what was hardest about, you know, the last five years for me is to watch the swift uptick in the glee at dehumanizing other people. Absolutely, and I worry about what happens to us when we don't view each other as neighbors. You know. I I am a staunch defender of justice, and I'm pretty willing to sit down with almost anyone and hear their perspective. Because what I've found in traveling all over the country and all over the world and moving to towns and cities and places, is that even people who don't think they'll have anything in common with me if we share a meal, by the end of it, we're friends. And a lot of the hatred and blame it comes from ignorance, lack of contact, lack of exposure, you know, why not about you. But sometimes when I was and I backed off from it completely, when I was hysterically rapid political, when Trump was in and using blame as weaponizing blame or hatred all the time, I would look at some of the outpouring of violence, you know, murderous hatred towards me for saying and I'd click on those people's timelines and I'd read where who they were talking to, they were listening to. And I think, you know, if I only had these sources of information, I would think the same as you did. You know, and you know, and you have to question, you will, are my sources as valid? Who am I thinking that the media that is so introduced by Trump and everyone else, that lamestream media, maybe they're aligned to me, but actually they have journalistic standards. I mean America more so than Britain, certainly printed press, you've have three independent sources of cooperation exactly. I mean, there are objective standards that just aren't adhered to elsewhere. My friend Stephanie teaches community college in Oklahoma, and one of the things she teaches is trying to get her students to find what verifiable, reliable sources are before their form opinions and when they're writing, and it's very difficult. They can't even agree often on one of verifiable sources. Well, and I think it can be very hard to even imagine that there are entire troll farms, you know, funded by dark money, that literally spend all day making disinformation look like real news. You know, we we don't do that. You and I don't do that all day. Most people can't imagine that that's real. So when something looks real, they think it is real. We're we're in a new kind of battle that I think a lot of people. But you never win a battle with someone who thinks something by turning them their wrong. And there lie the only way. And it's impossible. I was talking about it before these reason Mike one could someone I was talking to a Hollywood mogul the other day going listen, you have all these have all these people that you can influence, you tell these stories on a gigantic scale. Can you use your smarts and contacts to establish a neutral source of fact so that everybody, whatever side of any political special they sit on, go, well that's a fact. Let's start joining And he went, no, of course I can't. That's impossible. But that's that's the biggest task facing us, whether it's on climate change or immigration or anything in the world. What's a fact? Yeah, it's crazy how they go this was there a question? Well, we started I feel like I'm on a soa. We started way back at the beginning of our tangent talking about you know, sort of growing up and identity and I guess I My my curiosity, um, was to dig a little more into you know, the community that you grew up in Liverpool versus when you moved to London and you began having your sort of chameleon multiple personalities in various different places. Yeah yeah, I wouldn't they were, they really were. But but to your point about being a performer, you you had your sort of chameleon stage where you experienced all of these things with all of these groups, and you talked about college and that sort of bizarre world that you dropped into. But that's where you found acting. I also found an identity because I didn't know who. You know, what was my label before? That was I. It was either kind of slightly vulgarian from north West London, Jewish world. Was I, you know, a guy from Liverpool. I was Jasoniced as a student actor or student director like that was the thing. I had a label, UM, and I loved it. I loved it. I had someone to go to. It might have been maybe it would have been just as comfortable a community if I joined the Origami group whatever. Just I had some people. I had my people, UM, and the stuff that we talked about it seems so much more interesting than stuff that that people were talking about when they were having drinks in each other's room or party, but stuff talking about the stuff of life. Now we hadn't really lived any life ourselves yet, but still we were talking about those things. And we also did all those things that student draw me. Know, you think it's clever to be naked and swear a lot, and all the players are always about sex. But but I love that village, you know that suddenly there's a new village every time. And I went to the Edinburgh Festival at of Fringe Theater a lot, and to the National Student Theater Company a lot. I really I think I probably dealt with or engaged with it in the same way engaged with books when I was younger, or candy when I was younger, or drugs when I was older. Like it just I went full tilt. I went, oh, this is the thing, let's do this. And that's what it was like getting into the theater. Yeah, just just let's do Why would I do anything else? Like why any part of my day that isn't doing this is a wasted part of the day. Like when I used to smoke a lot, anytime I inhaled, and I wasn't inhaling. Smoke seemed like a wasted inhale. And that's what it felt like doing plays and putting plays on and directing places and stuff. That's sort of you know, you hear the term adrenaline junkie, but I think about some of that relentless almost as being like a pleasure drunkie in the way that you describe it. This like desire to really feel, to have it be experiential all the time. You found it in theater. But you say that you knew you had it. Perhaps you knew you had it. Upon reflection as a child with books, with skateboarding, I didn't. I didn't have a sense that I liked extremes when I just you know, if I wanted to finish a book, I would make myself finish the book. If I was tired falling asleep, I'd prick myself with pins or splash myself with water. I'd be under the cover with a flashlight because I'm going to finish this book tonight. And I finished the book. You know, I just I had a tendency to I don't know what to too extreme, to extremity, to not want you to give in too. I don't know what good sense I think, why what is giving into good sense feel like giving up? No, I don't know. I mean, I don't really stand it. I recognize that I've had it in my life and that, you know, it's what has sustained me. Sometimes it's helped me achieve things. At other times it's destroyed me. At other times it's just an instinct to push through and not to settle for mediocrity. Yes, So then, how as that sort of drive is applied to theater, do you wind up graduating with a large degree? How does that happen? Well, I mean I have a law degree. It's technically true. First of all, none of those laws are still in place. I don't think that I studied them, you know, pre thatcher. But I think they gave me the law degree in the end because they didn't want to failure on their books. I did very well in the first and second year. By the end of the third year I knew, I do know. At the beginning the third year I was going to go to drama school, and so I didn't. Yeah, so the so I didn't go into the law faculty at all. I did know lectures. I did know essays and no tutorials. UM. And then I took the exams, you know, and I wrote down what I thought the laws ought to be, not what they were, and I drew pictures to illustrate some. I even tried to cheat at one point because I just had there was a subject, I just knew nothing about it at all. And I shared a house with other student lawyers, and I got them to try and come in my room and briefed me the night before. And the notion that you could be briefed in one night for what these very smart people had studied all years laughable. And I tried to look at a little kind of cheat sheet, M and I wrote down a list, because in those days, studying laws a lot about memory, memorizing cases. UM. So I thought I wrote out ten case names. I write them on a piece of paper, and I thought that would jog the memory of the thing I had half looked at at four o'clock this morning. That morning, UM, and I went into the exam and I knew nothing, and I went to the toilet and I pulled this piece of paper out and I looked and I tried to remember four names that I could come back and expand on UM. And I went and sat back down to my scene, and I couldn't remember what they were, so I think they gave me a degree. They took my honors away, so it's an LLLB with honors, and they took the honors away because I've done well in the previous two years and they thought in that third year, Um, he's not going to be a lawyer. He's not going to shame us in court, and we don't want to have a failure in our books. Was there a conversation about this with your brothers, because they went very traditional. You have a lawyer, you have a doctor, you have an accountant. You know, in the troop of the four of you, did you admit to them what was going on at the time or now? No? No, I was, I mean I did. That's funny. My god a daughter at university now and she never calls and and she doesn't really answer when I call her, and I get incredibly upset because we've been very close as parents all the time. And then I remember that I would call once every couple of weeks on a pay phone for five minutes. You know, I really I walked away from my family, away from the world. Whe it was a pretty dysfunctional family. You know, you don't become a drug addict or an actor, frankly, unless there's some cracks in the mold. And we were not that kind to each other. There's some very destructive behavior going on, and so I didn't share it with them. I did talk to my dad today was nine. He asked me what my daughter, who's studying English at Cambridge is going to do? And I said, no, I did Dad. He said, well, but what does your plan to do a job but being English teacher? And I went, I don't think so why is she studying English? And I said, Dad, because what happens? You were poor? My dad left school at fifteen and work with his hands. And I go, and you wanted your kids to do better. They needed to study something professional, have a real job. So we all study these things that would not be you know, someone working with their hands like you were. And then I made some money, and so my kids don't think about having a job at all. They'll probably be poor and work and so their kids will once again be back on the cycle. But my kids just think that life is about dreaming and following you know your passions and who knows where they'll land. But yeah, they didn't mind. I guess for my parents, they had all the boxes ticked. And also I wasn't really a kid that you stopped doing what he wanted to do. I just I was pretty single minded. I did think. I don't know, you were you very successful, very young, um, and obviously made money. When I chose to be an actor in Britain, I chose to be poor, I thought. I mean, I chose a life of art that I imagine would have me in kind of one bedroom studio apartments, eating cold beans out of a tin, but being artistically fulfilled. There was no part of me the thought I would ever make a living at all. But I just thought, that's that. That's okay. I'll be okay with that for a while. Yeah, I mean, I didn't you know I spent years hustling and on the audition circuit and um, working retail. I'm like, no, I didn't, I didn't, did you know? They always say it takes years to become an overnight success, but I was in college, so I think it was less surprising. Um. God, I lived in ship holes at school every every summer because I didn't want to go home. My parents couldn't believe I didn't want to come back to the house for summer, and I was like, are you out of your minds? You think I'm coming home to a curfew? Like get out of here? Um Like, I wanted to act because I wanted not to be myself, wanted to explore other worlds. I wanted to be anything other than where what I was, where I came from. Yeah, you're looking for I for a person who I've learned other people view as um very in the middle of things. I genuinely feel emotionally like I'm in the corner most of the time. And I was such a voracious reader. And when I did my first play, it it's such a silly thing to realize, but it was like profound for me. I realized a play was just a book come to life and and the big story. Yeah, but it but it was it was the world's I would go into and feel seen and rep presented and see what I desired in my own life. It was that world was real while we were on stage. And did you like expressing your emotions in ways that you didn't do in your life? Where is that not true? For sure? I like shouting and crying and screaming and being angry fighting, not being scared, never, because when you have dialogue, you know, unless you're playing a scene where your character is fearful of something, I'm never afraid because I know I know what's coming. I'm I'm high on the unexpected experience inside of the container that I know that's an ultimate rush, but there is a safety, and this is the scene, and it will begin and it will end, and you will express and you will be free. You can find something but still know it. And it's a very strange duality that I think is so beautiful about what we do. You can have a completely unexpected experience on a road that is completely expected. But it was very affirming for me and in my own life, there was a lot of expectation to be good, always be good, always be home on time, never break curfew, never sneak out, always let someone else be the problem. So I never complained. I never had an issue. No matter how terrible something was, I gritted my teeth and I bared it and I did it and I made sure everyone else was okay. Well I did which you inherited because I'm not breaking confidence you, but you had some very unhappy work experiences where you also didn't speak out and didn't do this. Yeah, where we figured out inside spaces how to look out for each other, but we were never allowed to challenge authority. And then as I aged and got to understand more and did challenge authority, it got worse, not better. And and so I it gave me an immense amount of like DNA level understanding of other people in their own versions of those kinds of situations because you learn to cope so that it doesn't get worse. And it's part of the reason that I behave the way I behave on our set. It's remarkable. I you know, I did the whole David Us for our show yesterday and they're like, so tell me about Sophia Bush. What does the Bush like to work with? And and it is remarkable to watch you walk the walk and Katie, I'll showing a walk the walk that they both want to create a work environment that is full of people who want to go to work and feel like if they can, if they need to, they'll be heard if they speak out, and that they are being head for and listen to and uh, you know, there's that's the kind of corporate speak one expects to find absolutely everywhere where. When would anyone ever not say those things? But to see you do it and put it in motion and ask about people and see have Katie do it too, and Katie and Jenny whose company makes the show, for them to say um, which I found remarkable. So you know, I'm old. I've heard most sayings before. I certainly heard most bullshit Hollywood sayings a million times. And then for them to say I can't remember which one of Katie Jenny said. When people come to me with something, my first instinct is to say yes, and then I want to work out why. And I've been around, only been around people who who want to say know and how dare you? And then work out why? Um? And And so I see you at work, not that you're losing focus on the acting, but that you want work to be a place where justice prevails and the people are treated right and that ah, it's just you know, I've been working a long long time, and I've worked on some very lovely sets with some very lovely people, But I've never been around a place where that is a priority and put into action like it is. We're around here. It's remarkable. That makes me so happy. Well, this is a lot of fun. Do not forget that this is just part one.