Jason Isaacs is coming clean about getting clean.
The 57-year-old actor, best known for his portrayal of Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, revealed to The Big Issue that he’s dealt with ‘decades-long love affair with drugs’ that began with heavy partying as a teenager.
‘I’ve always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades-long love affair with drugs,’ he said in a series called Letter to My Younger Self.
The latest: Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs, 57, revealed to The Big Issue that he’s dealt with ‘decades-long love affair with drugs’ that began with heavy partying as a teenager
The English performer said his actions were ‘filtered through a burning need [he] had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible,’ and that ‘no message would get through for nearly 20 years.’
Isaacs, who’s also been seen in the movies Black Hawk Down, The Patriot and Armageddon, opened about how he initially got drunk off of whiskey at the young age of 12, which led to immediate consequences.
‘The barman, who we thought at the time was a hero and I now realize belonged in prison, sneaked us a full bottle of Southern Comfort,’ he wrote. ‘We drank the entire thing in the toilet, then staggered out into the party, reeling around farcically.
‘I vomited, fell on and pulled down a giant curtain, snogged a girl, God bless her… ran out into the street, vomited again, tripped, smashed my head open on the pavement and gushed blood all over my clothes.’
Trademark: The actor is best known for his portrayal of Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies. He’s seen with Ralph Fiennes in 2010’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Opening up: Isaacs said he initially got drunk off of whiskey at the young age of 12, which led to immediate consequences
The Golden Globe-nominated performer said that in the wake of the drunken incident – even with the ramifications – he was on a destructive path.
‘The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache, stinking of puke with a huge scab and the memory of having utterly shamed myself,’ he said. ‘All I could think was… I cannot f***ing wait to do that again. Why? I’ve no idea. Genes? Nurture? Star sign?
‘I just know I chased the sheer ecstatic joy I felt that night for another 20 years with increasingly dire consequences.’
The actor, who’s been on TV shows such as Star Trek: Discovery, Awake, Star Wars Rebels and Brotherhood, said he had a turnaround moment when he realized how addicted he was, and how it had impacted the way he was viewing the world.
‘I remember there being a moment, not long before I got clean, when it suddenly occurred to me that if everybody I knew died, literally every single person, I probably wouldn’t mind that much,’ he said.
The actor continued: ‘In fact, I might like it, because then it would be an excuse to sit in a room by myself and take drugs and everybody else would say, ‘Well you know, fair enough, you heard what happened didn’t you?”‘
After sobering up, he came to realize that it wasn’t ‘true and never was’ as he was always a loving and caring person.
‘The drugs weren’t a way of dealing with that sense of distance,’ he said, ‘the drugs were causing it.’