The “deeply offensive” movie Jason Isaacs admitted he was wrong about: “You should be ashamed”
Making a movie about one of the world’s most evil periods isn’t an easy undertaking, especially where Nazis are concerned. Probably Hollywood’s most favoured group of historical scumbags, over the years, people have used them for comedy, like in The Producers, for horror, like 2018’s Overlord and even football, with Escape to Victory. But one thing’s for sure, if you’re an actor considering doing a film about Nazis, it helps to have read the script first, as Jason Isaacs will tell you.
In 2008, Isaacs was in the midst of being a different kind of horrible person in films, albeit a made-up one in the form of Lucius Malfoy, the nasty piece of work constantly trying to kill brave Harry Potter while sucking up to Lord Voldemort. So he was used to being a fairly unpopular character with moviegoers, but a project about the holocaust is a totally different story, and that’s what landed in his lap that year.
Good was a controversial play written in the early 1980s by Scottish playwright Cecil Philip Taylor, and for some time was considered hugely controversial due to its subject matter. It told the story of a professor living in wartime Germany with a Jewish best friend who is seduced into joining the Nazi party and all they stood for. The stage version has since been in production all over the world right up to 2022, when David Tennant was involved.
But for some 20 years, there was no talk of a film version until a producer called Miriam Segal, who had always wanted to make a big screen adaptation and happened to be a former classmate of Isaacs, finally secured the rights. She had also spoken to Viggo Mortensen, who had seen the play while on a trip to London in the early ‘80s.
As Isaacs told Vulture: “(Segal) called me and she said, ‘I have the rights for the play Good, and I want to make it a film. Do you want to help me?’ And I said ‘No! I think it’s deeply offensive, and you as a Jewish woman should be ashamed of yourself. It’s an apology for Nazism.’ She asked, ‘Have you read it?’ and I said ‘Of course I have,’ and she said, ‘Well, read it again and think about it.’ And I took it from her, because I was lying — I hadn’t read it and I hadn’t seen it because I found the idea offensive. And I read it and I found that okay, I’m wrong, and we should make it. It’s important. There’s almost no area of life where there isn’t some ethical challenge.”
It’s possible that, given the poor reviews Good received when it was released, Isaacs might have wished he hadn’t bothered, although his performance and that of Mortensen as the professor did get some praise.
After the movie’s release and wrapping up his work on the Harry Potter films three years later, Isaacs didn’t really have what might be considered a ‘hit’ for some time. However, he was excellent in Armando Iannucci’s comedy The Death of Stalin in 2017. Still, he was recently thrust into the world of internet memes and pop culture fame thanks to his fantastic turn in the third season of The White Lotus, the darkly comedic series from HBO.
Isaacs plays a shady businessman from the south of America who is on a Thai holiday with his family while hearing the FBI has raided his office back home, causing all manner of meltdowns.
