Jason Isaacs On Timothy’s “Bliss” In ‘The White Lotus’ Finale & Vindication For His North Carolina Accent [Interview]

When “The White Lotus” season three first dropped on viewers’ television screens earlier this year, there were many keyboard critics of the southern accents adopted by stars Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. As the series went on, those rumblings diminished, but Isaacs was always confident in his choices. Speaking to The Playlist earlier this month, he touts, “I can do magic, I can juggle, and I can do accents.”

READ MORE: Natasha Rothwell pitched Belinda’s big moment in “The White Lotus” Season 3 [Interview]

Then again, his accent skill, in this case, a very researched articulation from Durham, North Carolina, is what he jokingly considers a “tremendous psychological weakness.” He admits, “I’ve always code-switched. I’ve had a lot of accents in my life, and not consciously and not proudly. I think I’ve grown out of it now. I hope I have, but I always wanted to sound like the people I was talking to, so I wouldn’t stick out.”

That being said, the accent he found for the very well-off financier Timothy Ratliff was quite specific. It didn’t sound like the familiar Southern or even mild North Carolina accent many Americans are used to. But, again, Isaacs knows accents, and he earned some welcome validation while attending the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The “Harry Potter” star recalls, “People from Durham would fight across the room to come and tell me, ‘You sound exactly like my dad.’ ‘He sounds like my brother.’ ‘I worked at the golf club. You sound like all the people I served at the golf club.'”

Despite his meticulous research, which Isaacs dives into during our conversation, it was Timothy’s hidden despair throughout the series that was genuinely the most difficult part of the role.

Isaacs reveals, “It was my job and no one else’s to work out where he was in his journey towards suicidal depression or homicidal mercy killing and how many pills he’d taken that day, whether he just had an articulate conversation with his lawyer, or whether he could barely speak and he’s slurring his words. So, that was much more difficult than the accent.”

For our chat, Isaacs provides an in-depth look into his creative collaboration with series creator and director Mike White, how Timothy is the unexpected character to find spiritual enlightenment in Thailand, and much, much more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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The Playlist: You have been a part of many great television shows over your career. What would the biggest difference you’d say about working on something like “The White Lotus” is compared to everything you’ve worked on before?

Jason Isaacs: Far more people have watched it. It’s really pretty simple and empirical. Also, the writing is so magnificent, it just seems to resonate with everybody across the world. We are not just publicizing in America, England, the cast has spread all over the world, like with “Harry Potter.” I guess when you write something specific, it becomes universal. It’s not that people have loved watching it; people like watching lots of things. People want to keep talking about it and thinking about it, and they find themselves on their own dilemmas in the characters. Something to do with Mike’s brilliance as a writer and as a director, which I think gets overlooked a lot. Helps, I guess, [that] the actors create characters that engage people that engage people in their, not just in the dilemmas of the character, but they see their own lives and their dilemmas mirrored. The truth is, I dunno, I try and sound clever. I’ve had this experience before when you’re in something that’s successful, I listen to my colleagues all waxing lyrical and sounding articulate, but nobody really knows why something works this well. I’m embarrassed by the stuff I just said to you in the last 30 seconds. Something about what Mike did this season…I think it was much richer and more profound, it was much more about what is the self and existential questions is why he set it in Thailand. Something just worked for people, and if anyone really knew what it was, they’d be able to repeat it and bottle it. And it seems the only person with the key to the bottling plant is Mike White.

I talked to Natasha last week, and she was telling me that when you were shooting, you would literally be in your hotel rooms and having to be quiet because there was filming going on, potentially right down the hall. Have you ever experienced anything like that in your career?

Well, once only, I went and did a tiny no-budget film where we all lived in the same cottage where we were filming. But no, I’ve never had seven months of living in [it]. And it’s odd this because, of course, we’re asked about it a lot because it looks like an incredibly luxury experience, and we were in luxury hotels, but we shot in multiple different hotels. We were always all together. We always saw everybody at breakfast and stuff. It’s like the longest summer camp you’ve ever been on. So, it was an odd experience living and working and playing and being sick and being happy and dancing and being miserable and all those things with each other all the time. An instant arranged marriage with about 300 people.

READ MORE: “The White Lotus” breakout Sarah Catherine Hook cannot escape “Piper, No!”

As an experience. Was it less of going to shoot a project in [aradise than you thought it might be? Or did you have pretty realistic expectations of what you were getting into?

I don’t think any of us had any idea what the experience was going to be like. And it was so many things, and one of the problems we’re doing so many interviews is, of course, necessarily you have to sum it up. And it was so many things on so many different days and through different moods and times and different relationships that it’s actually impossible. We not being honest if we say either it was a fabulous holiday or it was a stressful time. It was all of life. It was like a mini microcosm of 40 years’ worth of experience living in a village somewhere, crammed into seven months.

I know that Mike does not love to give a lot of backstory to a character. Did you feel like you had to come up with your own backstory for Timothy?

Yeah. Oh God, yes. Yeah, yeah. I feel like I had to. No, it’s just that there’s a misconception about acting oddly, that even some directors have – Mike doesn’t have it, he’s a brilliant actor himself – which is that acting is the stuff you see on the outside. Someone shouting, someone screaming, someone crying. And that’s the kind of 1% of the iceberg in my job. I always think it’s the 99% to fill it up. Someone’s written the 1%, but you have to make it understandable to an audience why they’re seeing the thing that they’re seeing and all the things that are not being said and all the things the character’s thinking and feeling. It’s not about actions, it’s about imagination. And everybody has an inner monologue. Actually, Tim, more than anyone I’ve ever played, is isolated, and his head is exploding in every direction. It’s like a pinball in there, just from catastrophe to shame, to murder, to suicide, to hope, to all those things. He’s never not been able to solve anything before. So yeah, I had to fill all those things in because you can’t have a vague sense of being upset. You can’t have a vague sense of being depressed. They’re all very specific thoughts. “What if I do that? That’s not going to work. This person’s going to think that.” And then Mike, being the magnificent writer he is, what you’re looking at out of your eyes as well and around you is so three-dimensional and believable. It fuels that imaginative world you’ve built. But yeah, you can ask me anything about him. I know everything about what he’s thinking, how that changes second to second. To be honest, that was my biggest fear, taking [him] apart, which is that I would have created this nonstop world. Everything about my existence exploding and imploding inside my head, but the audience would just see some stoned idiot sitting in the corner [like] some extra from a Cheech & Chong film that had drifted into “White Lotus.” And I shared that anxiety with Mike, and he tried very hard to assuage my fears, but that was my challenge as an actor in this, with virtually no words to take an audience on the inner journey that Tim went on. And I know where he plays golf. I know what he wears. I know about their sex life. I know what he really thinks about his kids. I know all those things, and hopefully, some of it you’ll get. You don’t have to think the same things I’m thinking. You just have to think that I am thinking something.

So you gave him a North Carolina accent.

Durham? It’s always got to be one town and not just Durham. Within Durham, it’s a blue-blooded, rich, privileged man who wants to sound like his grandfather. There are all very specific.

How did you find that?

I don’t sleep much. Well, first of all, Liz Himelstein is one of the great dialect coaches in the world. So, we broke down what we thought were the vowel sounds and the tunes. There’s music to every accent. But then, between her and I, we searched and we found local politicians. I found archive footage of what people would’ve sounded like, what my grandfather would’ve sounded like. And you build an accent because no one sounds like anybody else. Members of the same family can have different accents. It was a hilarious part of doing this show that so many people think that I’m getting the accent wrong, and they can criticize my acting all they like. But so many people from Durham seek me out to tell me…In fact, I was just in Washington for the weekend lobbying for the National Endowment for the Arts, and then went to the White House Correspondents Dinner, and people from Durham would fight across the room to come and tell me, “You sound exactly like my dad.” “He sounds like my brother.” “I worked at the golf club. You sound like all the people I served at the golf club.” But you need to know people not just from Durham, but those kinds of people, to know whether it’s accurate or not, because it has one sound in it, which has never changed from the colonial days. The “o” sound, you know, when people make do Victoria’s accent for fun, they go “Piper, no!” That “o.” That’s “o” in upper-class English. They go, “I know,” that’s the same dip, which is a two-part vowel sound. And then the other sound is “got” and “knot.” And when people say “taught,” “naught,” and in a certain kind of [entitled] person says “god,” “not, which is very English and it is part of that class of blue blooded American that didn’t want to let go of their colonial heritage and it stayed through the years.

This sounds like a stupid question. You work with a dialogue coach, but she’s not on set. How do you track it? Is someone in continuity or an AD assisting?

No, no. There was nobody else who could police it. There’s no one else as good as Liz, so no, no, no. It’s one of those things I can do. I can do magic, I can juggle, and I can do accents. Partly it’s a tremendous psychological weakness of mine, a social weakness that I’ve always code-switched. I’ve had a lot of accents in my life, and not consciously and not proudly. I think I’ve grown out of it now. I hope I have, but I always wanted to sound like the people I was talking to, so I wouldn’t stick out. There are two types of actors. Often, I think there are the ones who are so confident and so comfortable with who they are that they share that with the world, and it’s very often very charismatic and sexy and fabulous. It makes them stars. And then there are those people that are the opposite and want to create characters and new people because it’s a lifelong search driven by curiosity for why other people seem so comfortable in their skin. And I’m that ilk. And so partly because I was very self-conscious as a kid and as a young person, and even now sometimes I’ll be in the back of a taxi and my kids will go, “Dad, what are you doing? You’re not Irish.” So, I have the ability to listen to people’s voices. I can’t sing, but I have the music of accents I always hear. I’ll tell you what was much more difficult was calibrating how out of his head he was, because I’m taking lots of pills and drinking. But you walk through a door in February, and then you come out the other side in August, and we didn’t shoot anything in order. So, you shoot a bit from episode seven and a bit from episode two and a bit from episode three if they took place in the same location and it was my job and no one else’s to work out where he was in his journey towards suicidal depression or homicidal mercy killing and how many pills he’d taken that day, whether he just had an articulate conversation with his lawyer or whether he could barely speak and he’s slurring his words. So, that was much more difficult than the accent.