The line of dialogue Jason Isaacs thought would cost him his career: “Will I ever work again?”
While you might not think of Jason Isaacs as a major movie star, his résumé is right up there with the best of them.
As well as his obvious appearances in the Harry Potter franchise, he’s turned up in a number of high-profile projects across his near 40-year career, including box office hits, indie dramas, animated smashes, whatever the hell Scoob! was, where you don’t have to look very far to find him.
One of the Briton’s earliest forays into Hollywood came in one of the most mocked blockbusters of all time, which saw him play scientist Ronald Quincy in Michael Bay’s logic-murdering asteroid-a-thon, Armageddon. Despite missing out on a chance to play one of the astronauts, this was still a huge deal for the young actor, and it might have been laughably stupid, but Armageddon ended up being the highest-grossing movie of the entire year, which surely couldn’t have been a bad thing.
Speaking on the Awards Chatter podcast, Isaacs revealed that he thought his one big scene was going to ruin his entire life. The scene in question involves his and Billy-Bob Thornton’s characters explaining the impending asteroid strike on Earth to a group of astronauts. This involved Quincy using a makeshift approximation of the giant space rock, something he felt made him look like an intergalactic douche.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is the low point of my career’,” he said, “I was playing ‘the smartest man on the planet’, as Billy Bob explained to the astronauts what they were gonna do, and I was holding a papier-mâché asteroid on a stick, thinking, ‘I’m not sure the smart man on the planet will be doing this’.”
Isaacs remembered the one sentence that was going through his head during this entire ordeal: “Will I ever work again?”
As was alluded to earlier, he is far from the only person with a dim view of Armageddon, where its impressive box office returns were accompanied by scores of reviews absolutely ripping the thing to pieces. Neil deGrasse Tyson (who knows about this stuff) claimed that the film violated the laws of physics more than any other at the time of its release, but it wasn’t just outside observers who were negative.
Ben Affleck famously questioned why drill operators were being trained as astronauts rather than the other way around, while Thornton, Isaacs’ unfortunate scene partner, has been incredibly vocal about how much he regrets ever signing his contract.
As we all know, Isaacs did, in fact, work again. Two years later, he appeared in The Patriot, another big-budget movie with a slightly dodgy reception, after which more high-profile roles followed with Black Hawk Down and Windtalkers, before Lucius Malfoy came along to secure his legacy.
It’s silly to look back at something like Armageddon as a career killer. It might have been a brain-cell killer, but it was so astronomically successful (pardon the pun) that it was never going to put anybody off; Isaacs just had to swallow his pride and hope he never ran into anyone with a degree in astrophysics.
