Jason Isaacs has said that he and his wife got married to secure her medical insurance during an emergency hospital trip in Los Angeles.
The 61-year-old Britishactor, best known for roles in Harry Potter, TheDeath of Stalin and The White Lotus,married his wife, Emma Hewitt, in 2001 during an impromptu ceremony at a registry office while they were staying in Los Angeles.
Speaking on the Table Manners podcast with Jessie and Lennie Ware, Isaacs revealed that he and his wife decided to get married so that Hewitt could obtain emergency medical insurance to access urgent healthcare in the US, since she was pregnant and dealing with lung problems.
Isaacs said: “We were in Los Angeles. She was pregnant, Emma, she'd been sick [and] had lung problems, and we wanted to fly home.”
“And I phoned my brother, who's a doctor, and he put us on to a lung specialist. The guy said you need to go to a hospital and have a check for pulmonary embolism right now, because you shouldn't get on a plane, because she's had two courses of antibiotics. Still got lung ache.”
Isaacs explained that his wife did not have insurance coverage in the US, but he had his medical insurance under his Screen Actors Guild (SAG) membership, which Hewitt could access if they were married.
“So we went to a registry office in Los Angeles, and then we went straight to ER. Then she got medical insurance,” he said.
The actor explained that, after several checks, doctors found that Hewitt didn’t have a clot in her lung.
The situation could have been costly if she had not obtained the insurance.
“In America, you don’t want to go to hospital if you don’t have health insurance,” he said. “My mate Daniel, I took him there for the night once, I drove him there at 2am and we left at 6am and it was $40,000. It was like $60 for each Nurofen, $10 for the cup and $20 for the water… it was a bunch of nonsense.”
Isaacs added that their two daughters – Lily and Ruby – were “desperate” for them to have a proper wedding after never arranging celebrations with their wider family.
The actor explained that they don’t celebrate the anniversary of their marriage, and instead count the date they got together – at a Halloween party in 1987 – as more significant.
He explained that they were both studying at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London when they shared their first kiss.
“Our real anniversary was Halloween – we were at drama school together and we went to a stage manager’s party and we got behind these Venetian blinds and we started snogging. And that is, for us, the night we became the couple.”
Isaacs remarked that their classmates didn’t believe they would last, but they were still together 37 years later.
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