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Jason Isaacs takes a debonair turn as Cary Grant in the new BritBox miniseries “Archie” — but said he was initially “terrified” and turned down the role.
“I don’t normally get scared of playing parts,” Isaacs, 60, told The Post. While he’s co-starred in many high-profile movies and TV shows — including the “Harry Potter” films, “Black Hawk Down,” “Peter Pan,” “The Death of Stalin” and “Star Trek: Discovery” — he said he was apprehensive about this performance.
“Because it’s Cary Grant,” he said. “If you ask people on the street about him, the same adjectives come to the surface: debonair, smart, ladykiller, the epitome of masculinity. I thought, ‘Why would anybody try and step into boots which are 100 feet long?’ And, you have that unusual voice.
“It turns out that he struggled himself to play Cary Grant, which is why there’s no recorded interview of him,” Isaacs said. “When he got off set and got home, he was almost the opposite of every quality the world thought he had. I was anxious that people would expect to see Cary Grant on the screen, which I could never and would never try to be.
“But, I rose to the challenge of showing them the man they didn’t know, behind the mask.”
The miniseries, created by Jeff Pope, airs on ITV in the UK and streams on BritBox in the US starting Dec. 7. It’s a straight-ahead biopic about Archibald Leach (Cary Grant’s birth name), from his impoverished and troubled beginnings in Bristol, England, to his reinvention as the movie star legend, Cary Grant, to his tumultuous marriages later in life — especially with his fourth wife, Dyan Cannon (Laura Aikman), to whom Grant was married from 1965 to 1968.
He’s played by younger actors in early years (namely, by Dainton Anderson, Oaklee Pendergast and Calam Lynch), but Isaacs plays the mature version of Grant with which the world is most familiar.
Isaacs said that while reading the scripts, he “realized they’re not about Cary Grant. They’re about a man called Archibald Leach, who was so damaged, and so destroyed by his childhood, that he created this superhero avatar for himself called Cary Grant that the world fell in love with — but [it] just made him feel even more unlovable … and the journey he had to go on, to find any kind of peace.
“That felt like something worth doing.”
To prepare, Issacs watched Grant’s movies. He cited his favorite as “His Girl Friday,” because, “You can still see the traces of where he came from. That kind of New York street entertainment. Because the dialogue is delivered at five times human speed. The madcap farce of it all is my favorite era of his performance.”
He also spent time talking to Grant’s daughter, Jennifer, 57, and Grant’s ex-wife Cannon, 86.
“After many decades [Cannon] has an objectivity to talking about this catastrophic marriage. She, both in her book and in person to me, was able to detail so sensitively where the fault lines were, that stretched all the way back to his childhood, where he was not in control of his need to control,” said Isaacs.
“I read minutes of the business meetings that he went to. I managed to track down — because he wouldn’t let interviews be recorded — an illicitly recorded interview that he gave somewhere.
“Then, having done all that, and being able to take advantage of the incredible makeup and costume department so that I looked less like myself, I threw it all away. Because, you get to the set and have to be spontaneous, and hope that the work bubbles up to the surface.”
He recalled the first time he affected Grant’s famous Mid-Atlantic accent. For all his prep work, it was “still a terrifying day the first time I opened my mouth and made a noise, knowing that everybody on the set, even the caterers, were waiting to see what happened.”
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