Jason Isaacs Says ‘The White Lotus' Season 3 Was the ‘Saddest' Role He's Ever Had: ‘I Don't Know If I Can Do This'
[Editor's note: The following article contains spoilers for 'The White Lotus' Season 3, Episode 8, 'Amor Fati.']
Jason Isaacs considers his 'White Lotus' character arc to be his 'lowest point' emotionally as an actor. The 'White Lotus' Season 3 star detailed during 'CNN News Central' what it was like to get into the headspace of a patriarch who almost poisons his family to hide his financial ruin. (Don't worry, they all lived.)
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'That's the lowest point I've ever been, you know, as an actor – not as an actor, I mean, it's a magnificent show – but that's one of the saddest things I've ever done, a man who is about to – spoiler, cover your ears, cover the screen – kill his entire family and kill himself,' Isaacs said. 'And when I read the scripts, I thought, I don't know if I can do this. Like, I don't know how, if I can do it convincingly, believe, or if I can believe myself that I would ever do that. And watching that, it just reminded me of how unbelievably sad I was that day.'
He added, 'I mean, people think acting is pretending. You decide to pull a face or decide to do something with your voice. It's not really. You just try and be the thing.'
Of course, Isaacs' onscreen family is spared, to varying degrees of audience criticisms of the Season 3 finale. Isaacs recalled how even he and his fellow ensemble co-stars were 'sobbing' while watching the bloody final episode.
'We had a finale event on Sunday where we watched it with a big audience, and we all held each other's hands a lot of the time,' Isaacs said. 'And then we were kind of sobbing and holding each other a bit like the end of summer camp at the end. I don't know how much it was to do with the story, how much it was to do with the fact that we've been on this extraordinary adventure, and now we return to normal life.'
He particularly applauded Carrie Coon's now viral monologue about the meaning of life. 'Yes, I love the three women,' Isaacs said of his favorite storyline. 'I thought Carrie Coon on Sunday night, when she gave that speech, theirs is the least melodramatic story. There's no, you know, drugs or murder or, you know, suicide. But just the notion that time is going by and that she, you know, the people she's known forever are more important to her than anything else. She broke everyone's heart. The whole audience was sobbing.'
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