Jason Isaacs on playing Lucius Malfoy in "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" (2002); "I remember my very first day, I improvised a line. I had my first day, probably my first shot, I had to kind of flounce out of a room when Dumbledore, played by the late, great Richard Harris, put me in my place, and there was no line written, no exit line. And I’d been humiliated, and my plan had come to nothing. And I said to Chris Columbus, 'Don’t you think there should be a line?' And he said, 'Well, say something. Say whatever you like.' So we did another take, and I hadn’t told anyone what I was going to do. And as I turned to leave, I looked at Daniel (Radcliffe), and I said, 'Let us hope Mr. Potter will always be around to save the day.' And then Daniel, who was all of 12, stepped right up to me, looked me right in the eye, and said 'Don’t worry. I will be.' A chill went down my spine. And as he did it, I thought, 'Chr!st, this kid is good.'”
How did Isaacs first decide to create Lucius' rather unique bearing and haughty inflection? Blame Alan Rickman. "I got the part, and I thought, 'I'd better watch what the first one was like,'" says Isaacs. "And then I realized to my horror that Alan Rickman was in the first film, and utterly brilliant. Nobody does sinister like Alan Rickman. I thought, 'If I'm going to do something, it'd better be unbelievably extreme.'"
First up: Malfoy's appearance.
"I went to the set, and they had this idea of me wearing a pinstripe suit, short black-and-white hair," Isaacs recalls. "I was slightly horrified. He was a racist, a eugenicist. There's no way he would cut his hair like a Muggle, or dress like a Muggle." So Isaacs suggested instead that he wear a long white wig, and a particularly ostentatious wizard-like ensemble. "In order to keep the hair straight, I had to tip my head back, so I was looking down my nose at everyone. There was 50 percent of the character. I asked for a walking stick, which Chris Columbus first thought was because I had something wrong with my leg. I explained I wanted it as an affectation so I can pull my wand out [of the cane]. After a second's thought, he said, 'You know what, I think the toy guys are going to love you.' He was completely right."
Next: Malfoy's accent. "There's a particular art critic in England who has a voice like fingernails on a blackboard," says Isaacs, who in real life has a far more accessible, slightly working-class London accent. "I combined him with a teacher I thought was patronizing and sadistic when I was in drama school. To me what [the accent] smacks of is a sense of entitlement. I just wanted to find a voice that made him drip with the millennia that his family had been in power—complete disdain and contempt for anybody and everything else." (Reddit/EW)
Happy Birthday, Jason Isaacs!
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