Archie, written by Jeff Pope, is not the story of Cary Grant. The limited series isn’t for those looking for a tale that focuses on the debonair leading man whom audiences worldwide fell in love with and still swoon over today. Instead, it depicts the man as he was off camera: Archibald Leach, a tortured soul who constantly sought love and acceptance from those around him. The show is still filled with quippy dialogue and snapshots of old Hollywood glamour as the era it covers requires, but it also does not shy away from the darker moments found within the true story. It is equal parts superficially entertaining and emotionally mesmerizing. As the episodes unfold, you are guaranteed to see the award-winning actor in a new light and, if you really pay attention, may just learn a thing or two about what it means to be human in the process.   

Principle talked with Jason Isaacs about what he’s learned over his career, what it was like recreating some of the ionic moments from Cary Grant’s filmography, the most significant differences between Grant and Archie Leach, and more.

In Archie, you portray Cary Grant. With the obviously shared background of a long acting career, how do you think you’ve improved most as an actor since you first began over 30 years ago?

Over the years, I’ve learned, and am continually learning, from people who are better than I am. I try to work with young people or first-time directors often so that I don’t get stuck in what I know. I just did a low-budget horror film in Canada with two new directors who were fantastic. There’s always something new to learn. In terms of being on a set, I think how I’ve changed the most since my start is that once all the work is done – and in preparing to play Cary Grant, I did an enormous amount of work. I crammed my head and my heart with as much of his emotional background as I did with his physicality and mannerisms: how he walked, how he talked – I threw it all away on the day. I try to make sure that I’m completely free and open to whatever happens while shooting instead of imagining how a scene is going to go or what it’s about. For decades now, I haven’t tried to anticipate what the other person in a scene is going to do. It’s an improvised dance. Over the years, I watched actors who were much better than me go with whatever they were feeling at the moment and not planning or preparing to produce a certain experience. I watched as they did things that were not expected, often things that not even directors and even writers had expected. So, mainly, how I think I’ve improved most is in my ability to let go entirely of the notion that I can shape anything and to flow with whatever occurs at the moment, whatever is happening around me, and most importantly, what’s happening inside the person that is my opposite.

That’s a really interesting way to go about your career in terms of working with new creatives and up-and-coming artists because they have different ideas. I know a lot of people who, once they figure out what they think works, stick with that. I think your philosophy can be applied to more than just acting and is beneficial in a lot of ways to wide groups of people.

I hope so. It keeps things fresh. I’ve been incredibly privileged as an actor. I’ve mostly worked. I’ve reached a point where I do get offered work. But most of what I get asked to do is a repeat of something I’ve done before because if you’re casting something, you think, “Who have I seen play a part like this?” And if it’s me, that’s because they want me to do something they’ve seen before. I don’t ever want to do that. So, I’m seeking out new ground or new ways of doing things that initially looked like they were something I’ve done before.

Career-wise, what are some accomplishments you’re most proud of? 

Oh, Jesus, I never think of being proud of anything. That’s a cul-de-sac I wouldn’t dream of taking a grandmother’s footsteps in. There are projects I’ve been a part of that I think were fabulous. But, when I think about them, I never think about my contributions. I think about how the writing or directing was incredibly powerful or how the end result as a whole has affected people in ways that I can only dream of. When you’re an actor, the baseline for a project is that you engage people for an hour or two in a way that provides a healthy distraction, but what you’re aiming for, almost always, is not only to be entertaining, distracting or informing, but also for what you have created to stay with people in ways that are useful to their life afterward. The highest purpose of art and stories is to inspire and show the audience alternative choices to what they already know. I’ve been able to help tell a few such stories over the years that resonated for a long time afterward and affected people’s lives, even unconsciously. Those are the things I’m proud of. Certainly, never anything that I’ve done in them, but the stories as a whole. Madness and an empty house lie at the end of thinking any other way. My wife and kids wouldn’t put up with that for a nanosecond.

Speaking of your wife and kids, I was reading a lot of your previous interviews and found you are always very keen to talk about how acting is a job and that there’s so much more outside of it, that’s more important. So I was just wondering, where do you rate those career accomplishments inside your general life accomplishments?

I’m embarrassed by how much I sometimes enjoy acting and how fulfilling it feels when I’m doing it, but I’m very well aware when that moment stops. One of the great things about acting to me – and to many of my friends – is that you get entirely lost in it. It’s like meditation. When I step back from it, I’m well aware of how little it contributes to the world. The higher profile or sometimes even social status I get because of what I choose to do is a corrosive thing unless I use it, so where possible, I use it to add something of value to the world. I try to make people aware of things, change situations or get people to engage in some sort of activism. All around me, there are people on the ground every day, changing people’s lives for the better through their jobs. As much as I love telling stories, I know that all psychologists in the world agree that there are four things that make for a fulfilling life. The first is not being so poor that you can’t eat or don’t have a roof over your head. They all agree that poverty makes people unhappy. But, beyond that, the three other things aren’t material. They center around personal relationships and being of service. So, when I have the opportunity, I do what I can to be of service. 

I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for around ten years now. My favourite thing about it is the opportunity it affords those within to do something of value with the public attention they receive. So, when I do these interviews, I like to give people the opportunity to talk about any charities or causes that they think are important.

I’m an ambassador for the Red Cross, Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Marie Curie. There are a few other charities that I support from time to time, but those are the ones I advocate for most often. I’m a terrible catastrophist. I always have been. I can hear and see the twelve horsemen of the apocalypse galloping full-on toward me. Most recently, they have come in the form of climate change and the threat AI presents. I’m very geeky. But, all in all, the thing that humanity has to work on is compassion. If things are going to go to hell and get considerably worse in many areas, the first thing to go will be our collective compassion. This is evidenced by the unbelievably inflammatory rhetoric you hear around immigration and asylum seekers in this country, all the way across Europe, and that Trump echoed in America. For instance, here in Britain, there’s an obsession with people crossing The Channel in boats. There’s this insane arrogance – not borne out by any facts – that every immigrant in the world fleeing the danger and destruction of their home country wants to get to England, even though almost all of the world’s displaced and poor people go to their neighboring countries which are equally as poor. Of the people that do make it to Europe, a very small amount make it to England. Of those people, many of them actually have asylum granted by the conventions we’ve agreed to because they do indeed pass the test for being in imminent danger. There’s a narrative that’s built up in England that asylum seekers are opportunists who could perfectly well work in their home countries and that Europe is full of people just waiting to cross the channel. However, everyone I’ve met who has risked their life to be here has a heartbreaking story full of incredible racism and violent abuse. It stuns me that even some of my progressive friends have absorbed this narrative of awful language that there are “hordes of” or “invasion of people” who are making up backstories for sympathy when they were perfectly comfortable in the places they have quite literally escaped. I try to raise awareness for these people and change minds about things I think the general public is wrong about. My goal is to keep the pilot light of compassion alive for as long as I can.

I agree that we’ve become very self-centered as a whole. Compassion is a hard thing to come by these days.

Half the reason for that is because there are no facts anymore. Because everyone now lives inside an echo chamber where their own views are peddled back to them, it’s going to become increasingly difficult to prove that anything is true. Since I have this insanely artificial, elevated status as an actor, which means people sometimes listen to me, I can at least advocate for things that I know to be true and hope someone’s listening.

Speaking of acting, I read in a previous interview that you didn’t want to take on your role in Archie until you realized the story was centered around Archie Leach, not Cary Grant. To you, what is the most prominent distinction between the two?

There’s almost no overlap. Everything that Cary Grant was, all the adjectives that we’ve used for decades to describe him, look up whatever their opposites are, and you’ll understand Archie Leach. Archie was anxious. He was neurotic. He had drinking problems. He was extreme in every way that his on-screen persona was tempered. Far from women beating a path to him, he became obsessed with people he couldn’t have. When Sophia Loren rejected him, he couldn’t work for months. When his marriage broke down, he sobbed forever and had to pull out of films. He had OCD.

He was a very damaged human being. That’s the truth. The mental and emotional wounds from his childhood not only didn’t heal but actually got wider. An over-simplistic view of what he did was seek love, affection, approval, and validation initially from everyone he met and then everyone he was engaging with, and finally from the entire world. And he got it. He got this thing that some drive in him thought that he needed, and all it did was make him feel even more unlovable, empty, and fake. It was only when he walked away from it all that I think he began to heal. Although he could be Cary Grant when he tried, the persona was almost entirely unrelated to who he was between his ears and in his heart.

Did you feel like you were playing two roles in one at all?

No, because he was playing the other one. I’ll explain it like this: When you act in a theater, you go, “Okay, I’m gonna have to lean in and create this world with my brain” because there are just people standing on a stage. On film, it’s more literal. You think, “What I’m seeing is the world.” I never for a split second thought I was, as Dyan [Cannon] said to me, “the most beautiful man in any room.” She told me Cary would walk into a room, and all the men and all the women wanted him. I had to let go of that and assume the audience would meet me halfway and imagine I was that on screen. But Archie was code-switching all the time. Code-switching is something I’m very familiar with. I grew up with one accent. I moved to somewhere else where people had a different accent, so I completely adopted that accent. When I went to university and was surrounded by all these very wealthy, entitled members of the British minor aristocracy, I tried to blend in with them and sound like them. I’ve done that unconsciously all my life. I do it less now that I’m more settled in who I am, but I still find myself sometimes slipping into a voice that isn’t my own. It’s a strange psychological weakness that I’ve managed to monetize in some way and turn into a professional asset. 

[laughter]

So, the only person I had to make sure I was playing was Archie.

That makes sense.

There isn’t much overlap between us, but I am familiar with his need to constantly be playing a part. Another thing about him emotionally that I felt very keenly was how, when my children arrived, I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. Not that I didn’t look like I belonged in many places, but I’d spent almost all of my life not quite fitting in. It was the same for Archie. I think he ended up in theater for the same reasons I did. It takes a village to put on a play or make a film. There is genuine but instant intimacy you get just from just being a part of it. I didn’t have anywhere near as catastrophic a background as him, but my family felt very dysfunctional to me, and I wanted to be somewhere where I could feel the warm embrace of a bunch of people, so I turned to that community. But, it is a place where you never quite feel like both feet are anchored to the ground. When my children arrived in the world, I knew that I was a father and if I took my responsibility seriously, which I did and do, that that would be somewhere I’d always belong. It made everything else in my life seem like it was written in sand at the edge of the water and could get washed away.

Archie is sprinkled with iconic moments from Cary Grant’s career. Did it feel at all surreal to take part in recreating instances that are almost synonymous with the Golden Age of Hollywood?  

I was worried. It’s not like I wasn’t already enormously worried about stepping into these iconic-sized boots, but to actually recreate bits of some of my favorite films was daunting. In the end, it was a fun craft exercise. I was able to reference the frames as we shot and have them in front of me to try to get both his body movement and the language exactly as they are in the tiny sections that we show. I’m not a mimic. For the body of the show, I didn’t want to do anything that felt like an impression. Anybody who thinks they’re going to watch Cary Grant, who is planning on judging me by how exactly “like Cary Grant” I am, please don’t tune in. [laughter] It’s not worth it. You can watch Impressionists if you like parodies. I’m trying to create a real human being. However, in the moments in which we were recreating his filmography, I tried to approximate the exact shot as closely as possible, particularly when it came to his voice. Archie didn’t speak the same off-camera. He had very different rhythms. He was so rehearsed on camera that all of his line readings would have the exact same intonation pattern, so when we’d do the dialogue for the films, I wanted to get it exactly how it is in the movies to show that I could have done that had I chose to, but instead, I wanted to show you a man in all his colours.

Which of his films would you say are your favourite?

I watched all of them. They were useless in terms of research for this project because, as I said, Archie wasn’t anything like Cary Grant. I was trying to find out who the real man was, so they were nothing but misleading. 

[laughter]  

One of my favorites is His Girl Friday because it’s so completely different from the rest of his body of work. In it, he speaks at three times the pace any human being would ever normally speak. The dialogue is delivered at the pace of the voice at the end of pharmaceutical adverts when they do all the disclaimers. It’s insane how quickly they deliver it. It’s so silly and a theatrical performance. He’s at the very height of his powers of double and triple-taking, tripping over things, and mastering props. I like watching him do that kind of breakneck comedy. It’s fabulous and big. I also enjoy the films he made with Hitchcock because I like the fact that Hitchcock knew him and knew he wasn’t the man he was portraying on screen and knew that he was very tortured and capable of real darkness. Besides To Catch A Thief, which is a bit lighter, Hitchcock typically casts him as these notorious, manipulative and dark characters. Characters that do terrible things with such boldness and such masculinity. And then, I like watching Father Goose. It was the beginning of the end for him. 

How so?

He retired when his daughter, Jennifer, was born. The premise and, in a way, the logline even show how, at the height of his powers, the biggest star in the world, Cary Grant, stepped away to be a father. But I don’t believe that’s true or accurate. It’s what Jeff [Pope], who wrote Archie, thought when he started the project. However, I think that there was a big part of Archie that had curated this incredibly successful brand that was a billion miles from who he truly was. The whole world lusted after him, and he was getting too old to hold their attention in that way. They were young superstars coming through the system, taking his place. He didn’t know who to be next on screen in that respect because the persona that had shaped his career for so long was simply aging. So he started to do things like Father Goose and Walk Don’t Run, in which he managed the young couple’s relationship. Although they didn’t do terribly at the box office, he was clearly no longer the number-one superstar in the world. I think that was difficult for him. So, as he started to look after Jennifer around this same time, this feeling grew in him, not consciously necessarily, that this was the thing he was meant to be doing. 

Now that you have researched for and taken on this particular role, if you got to have dinner or speak to Cary Grant, actor-to-actor, man-to-man, is there anything you would ask him or anything you would say?

From what I now know about him, I know as much as there is to know. I don’t think he would be candid with me. I’d want to know about certain things that I think are true about his background that aren’t documented. But I don’t think he’d be candid about anything. I don’t think he was able to be honest with anybody he met and maybe not even with himself. He’s from that era, and the damage was so deep and so profound that the fault lines ran all the way through him. He’d have great anecdotes, but I don’t think he’d let me know anything insightful.

Do you think there was anybody in his life that he was fully himself with?

No, I don’t think he was. He didn’t have a true understanding of the things that are driving him. He knew enough to make sure the public never saw who he really was. With Betsy Drake, his wife for 13 years, he discovered and sought every kind of therapy under the sun. He was continually seeking some kind of peace and ease in his life. He could fake ease enormously well, but he was constantly ill at ease with everything and everyone apart from Jennifer.

Out of all the characters you have played, are there any roles that stand out more to you than others in terms of what they may have taught you about yourself or about people in general? 

I’m an actor because I don’t really know how to live or who to be. Every single time I get to be someone else, I learn a little bit more about either who to be or who not to be. That’s why I was drawn to doing it in the first place. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin and thought that if I could be in lots of other people’s skins, I’d get a roadmap for how to live.

That’s a good, incredibly honest answer. Would you say that your favourite thing about being an actor?

When I first started acting, I was at university, and I was socially uncomfortable. I stumbled drunk into an audition and got a part in a play. It was a lot more fun than anything else I’d done. I liked that no matter who you were or where you came from, you became just another person in the rehearsal room. I liked how, in the rehearsal room, people were having discussions of real substance about what makes people feel less than someone or more than someone and other topics that were of great value to me. Then, I went to Edinburgh and had these fabulous experiences that came with taking part in any group enterprise, that whole us against the world mentality. But, now that I’ve got a family and really good friends that I haven’t seen for years at a time, the “it takes a village” haze has worn off. I don’t really want new friends. I don’t get to see my old friends anywhere near enough. I don’t see my family enough. The things that attracted me to acting originally and the things that I now do it for are different. There are times that I do it just because it’s my job. There are times that I do it because it’s fulfilling and lovely. It’s like what people say about democracy. To me, it’s the least-worst option. I love acting sometimes. I hate it sometimes, but it’s the least-worst thing I can think of to do.

Finally, if ever a biopic were to be made out of your life, what would you like to be remembered for?

I’d like to be remembered for shutting the production down and destroying everything they’ve already filmed. [laughter] I’ve turned down those genealogical programs on television. I don’t want the spotlight on me at all. Not just because I like stories, and when I was growing up, I knew nothing about the actors in the films that I adored, but also because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t think I’m fixed enough to make a biopic about. I think it’d be very hard to write because I’m still not quite sure, at my ripe old age, who I want to be when I grow up.

Archie is now streaming on ITVX.

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