Jason born for the role
Isaacs on his ‘OA’ scientist Dr. Percy: ‘Don’t call him a villain!’
J ASON Isaacs knows his way around a good villain.
He’s played a bevy of iconic baddies such as the sneering Lucius Malfoy (“Harry Potter”), the scheming Captain Lorca (“Star Trek: Discovery”), the sociopathic Col. Tavington (“The Patriot”) and now the sinister Dr. “Hap” Percy in Netflix’s “The OA,” back Friday for Season 2 on Netflix.
“I’m unlikely to be cast as the insurance agent or the best friend — and I wouldn’t want to play them,” says Isaacs, 55. “I like to play things I can get my teeth into. You call it villains; I say they’re people who provide the engine of the plot. There is no drama without conflict. If you have a day where everyone’s nice to you, and one person treats you appallingly, that’s the thing you’re going to remember when you go to bed.”
Like its platform sibling “Stranger Things,” “The OA” follows a group of young misfits who bond with each other — set against the backdrop of alternate dimensions and nefarious scientists.
But instead of brimming with ’80s-era nostalgia, “The OA’s” backdrop is an eclectic tapestry of everything from the Russian mob to interpretive dance. The show follows Prairie (Brit Marling, also the co-creator), a blind woman who mysteriously reappears with restored sight, years after going missing. In Season 1, she revealed what happened during her lost time: a scientist (Isaacs) entrapped her in his basement with a group of human subjects in order to study near-death experiences.
“[Hap] is not a mad scientist,” says Isaacs, who lives in London with his wife, BBC documentary filmmaker Emma Hewitt, and their teenage daughters. “He’s actually onto something. He thinks that if he’d just master this technology, no one is ever going to have to die again in perpetuity.
“What makes a great antagonist that the audience loves to hate is somebody who utterly believes in himself,” he says. “Lucius Malfoy doesn’t look in the mirror and think, ‘I’m a bad guy.’ He thinks, ‘We need muggles out of this place, because wizards should rule the world.’ With ‘The OA,’ Hap thinks he’s going to kill death. It’s only when bad writing twirls an invisible mustache at the audience that characters don’t work.”
(Isaacs says the creators pitched five seasons of “The OA,” though Netflix has not announced anything past its Season 2 run.)
Season 2 of “The OA” is shrouded in secrecy, though we do know that several characters enter an alternate dimension. Luckily for Isaacs, thanks to his previous involvement in “Harry Potter” and “Star Trek,” this isn’t his first rodeo on a project with details under wraps. “If I meet someone socially and they ask me a question, it’s rude not to answer,” he says. “My wife Emma and I have been together 30-odd years. [Journalists] used to ask me when I was going to propose to her, and one day I suddenly realized, ‘I don’t have to answer!’ That bleeds into the professional arena, too.
“When I was doing ‘Star Trek’ and people came up to me in the street and wanted to know about the Captain, what was his secret ... they don’t really want answers,” he says. “They want the story to surprise them. And that’s for a normal story. Something like ‘The OA’ lives in its own wacky universe.”