The song Jason Isaacs wants to be played at his funeral
Jason Isaacs is British acting royalty, and like many of us, he has already planned out the track he wants to be played at his funeral. Although he frequently portrays villains, Isaacs wants his send-off to be a joyous occasion, as his song choice proves.
In 2021, Isaacs appeared on the Marie Curie podcast and opened up about the Jewish experience of funerals. In his culture, there isn’t an immediate aftermath that allows mourners to grieve. Family members instantly have to start preparations for the funeral, which typically happen the day after the death.
He explained: “I’ve listened to some of these podcasts and people have life-changingly open and vulnerable, honest conversations, but my family aren’t like that. In the Jewish religion, you have to arrange a funeral the next day, so you’re fully in the admin of it straight away.”
The death of his mother in 2014 had a profound impact on Isaacs and inadvertently altered his plans for the day of his eventual demise. Due to antisemitism, his parents moved out to Israel, and fortunately, he was working in the region when her health declined.
Isaacs recalled on the podcast: “Bombs started going off in Israel, rockets started coming across from Gaza. This was 2014, and the production I was shooting obviously shut down. The insurers shut it down. They sent everyone home and I got to stay just at the moment my mum moved into this place.”
He continued: “She was there for months, fading away, not quite understanding why she wasn’t getting better but, you know, continually talking to doctors and stuff, and everybody around knew, not because we had a diagnosis, but because it was clear that she was fading.”
However, despite being thankful to spend those precious months with his mother during the end of her life, Isaacs felt his family crumble after she departed — a feeling he doesn’t want to be replicated after his death. Therefore, his song of choice is ‘We Are Family’ by Sister Sledge, which he hopes will unite people.
Isaacs told NME: “I studied law before I decided to show off in funny clothes and the one area which absolutely came to life, oddly, was testate law, which has to do with whether people have or haven’t left wills and what’s contained in those documents. Fault lines in families snap over a chest of drawers and items that are completely irrelevant, because it’s really more about who has felt rejected.
“Funerals can bring that out of people, and when people who are the centre of a family die, everything else can fragment. After my mum died, we gather much less as a whole family because she was the fulcrum. It’s cheesy, but it’s to remind them all that they’ve got each other.”
Listen to Isaacs’ wholesome selection below.
