With age comes wisdom, or at least the awareness of when to let a stunt double do a scene for you. Maybe it was studying the meaning of death on The White Lotus or just one too many injuries on the set, but Jason Isaacs is more than willing to let stunt professionals stand in for him in a way he wasn't in his younger years. Case in point, he had a really nasty spill while filming Harry Potter, and was knocked out while filming a scene.
Isaacs has talked a lot over the years about Lucius Malfoy and getting into the mind of the evil father of Draco. This included his scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in which Lucius attempts to attack Harry after he causes him to inadvertently free the House Elf Dobby. The elf launches the elder Malfoy clear across the hall, and as Isaacs revealed to Collider, that scene was particularly violent behind the scenes:
They built a bit of rubber cobblestones. All I had to do was the last 3 or 4 inches. And I was so frustrated at not doing the pull that when I did that last 3 or 4 inches, I did it with incredible violence and knocked myself out.
Jason Isaacs has nothing but love for Johnny Flynn, the next man to play Lucius Malfoy, and I bet he hopes Flynn won't make the same mistake when filming that scene. I watched the scene after reading about this, and it doesn't seem as though they used the take where he knocked himself out.
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Jason Isaacs might be one of the few actors to file a workers' comp form with "CGI" being the reason for injury, and I'm sure he had plenty of thoughts about fan efforts to free Dobby when they visited the studio lot in 2015. I still can't get over the fact that he wasn't more seriously injured while filming that Chamber of Secrets scene considering how much airtime he caught from the stunt.
Dobby's attack on Lucius was fueled by years of pent-up rage, I'm sure, but it was also completely justified. As loyal Harry Potter fans likely know, Lucius Malfoy was about to unleash the killing curse on the child for costing him a House Elf. Isaacs later said the spell was uttered because he didn't know what else to say, and he's gotten all kinds of flak from fans since.
While Jason Isaacs has since deferred to stunt doubles for his action scenes, he hasn't stopped having injuries on the set. People reported that Isaacs ran into a door on a yacht while working on The White Lotus Season 3 and ended up knocking himself out. I'm beginning to think this is less of a stunt problem and maybe more of an Isaacs problem?
In any case, we love Jason Isaacs at CinemaBlend and hope he can be more careful on sets going forward. If I hear another story about him knocking himself unconscious while filming a scene for another project, I'm going to start to worry!
