EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: JASON ISAACS ON “DIG”
Interview with Jason Isaacs
Jason Isaacs speaks about his role as Peter on USA’s new mini-series, Dig, premiering March 5, 2015.
Jason Isaacs
USA’s ten-part miniseries DIG, which premieres Thursday, March 5, deals with a contemporary murder mystery that leads to a two-thousand-year-old conspiracy. Created by Gideon Raff (HOMELAND) and Tim Kring (HEROES) the show began filming in Jerusalem, where it is set, but wound up having to relocate to New Mexico when tensions flared between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
DIG stars Jason Isaacs as Peter Connelly, an FBI agent stationed in Jerusalem whose investigation into a killing takes some startling turns. Isaacs, originally from Liverpool, England, has an impeccable American accent, which he’s deployed in U.S.-set series including AWAKE and BROTHERHOOD, along with feature films including FURY. Isaacs also famously employed a U.K. accent, though not his normal speaking voice, as the villainous Lucius Malfoy in the HARRY POTTER films.
NBC has a DIG Q&A panel for the Television Critics Association with Isaacs, his costar Anne Heche and the creators/executive producers Raff and Kring. Later that evening, the network hosts a party at a Sunset Strip restaurant in West Hollywood, also for the TCA. ‘
This interview is a combination of statements made by Isaacs on the panel and a private interview at the party.
As Isaacs had made AWAKE with NBC only two years earlier, one obvious question is whether the network had come to the actor and said, “We’d like to do something else with you.”
In Isaacs’ view, it’s perhaps the other way round. “I’ve always said that. I’m probably the person who says it first, and they just nod in agreement. I had a great time making AWAKE, and I thought that all the people I met there, [NBC Entertainment Chairman] Bob Greenblatt and [executive] Jen Salke, were incredibly welcoming and we continue to try to find ideas to do together. It turns out this is on USA, which is one of the NBC/Universal cable networks, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m still in the family. So I never left.”
The title of DIG would seem at first glance to refer to archaeology, but Isaac says it also suggests much more. “It’s really about layers of history, and layers of the human heart, and layers of fanaticism. It’s about an FBI guy who is investigating a murder mystery in Jerusalem, and in so doing, he uncovers a conspiracy much, much bigger than he thought it would be and that stretches back thousands of years and threatens the entire future of the world, not to make it sound too dramatic.”
Could the world really end at DIG’s conclusion? Is it a closed-ended series? “Yeah, I think so,” Isaacs relates. “Not that [a big mystery] couldn’t happen again. As long as I’m still alive at the end of it – and given Gideon’s record on HOMELAND, that’s very questionable – I could be posted anywhere.”
This leads to another question. Since the FBI works primarily on U.S. soil, what is Isaacs’ character doing in Israel? “My character Peter is an FBI guy, he’s posted to the embassy in Jerusalem. Of course, they’re legal attaches, they really are posted to embassies all over the world.”
Did Isaacs do any research into FBI agents in order to play one? “I did,” he reveals. “When I first went to meet Gideon and Tim, it was such a fantastic page-turner of a story, and such an intricate conspiracy thriller, my first question was, ‘Where did you get the idea from? It’s full of mind-blowing premises.’ They looked at me and they said, ‘Well, it’s all true.’ I said, ‘Which bits are true?’ They went, “Well, most of it’s true.’ And so, apart from the fact that the character is very interesting, the journey is a puzzle that there’s tremendous entertainment in unveiling. I rushed back home and went to Wikipedia and Google and started to find out how much of this terrifying stuff, how many of these rather sinister groups, exist in the world, and the answer is, far more than you or I would like to believe.”
Filming in Jerusalem was inspiring, Isaacs adds. “The city of Jerusalem opened its gates to us. The people of Jerusalem have been amazingly welcoming and we shot in places that are so stunning to film in that in fact, the Israelis and the Arabs on the crew didn’t even know they existed. So we’ve been underneath the city, we’ve been in tunnels, we’ve been in caves. We’ve also been on top of the city, on the rooftops. We’ve been in places that the public just don’t ever get access to, and it makes the job of acting much easier, when you’re in a place where the stones come with history and all the bloodshed of the past and all the passion and all the major religions of the world have centered their attention on this one square kilometer of land. You can feel it. You can feel it in the stones, you can feel it in the air, you can see it in how people go about their business and it informs the acting and it informs the storytelling.”
[easyazon_block add_to_cart=”default” align=”left” asin=”B003P5DUV8″ cloaking=”default” layout=”top” localization=”default” locale=”US” nofollow=”default” new_window=”default” tag=”buzmag-20″]Speaking of storytelling, how does Isaacs feel about the way AWAKE ended? For those who haven’t seen the series, Isaacs played a police detective who awakens from a terrible car accident in two different realities. In one, his wife is still alive, but his son was killed in the crash; in the other his son is still with him, but his wife has died. At the end of the thirteen-week run, both realities are pulled together in a surreal way that has all three characters surviving, but raises new questions.
“No, I wasn’t satisfied with the fact that AWAKE wrapped up,” Isaacs says. “I wish I was still making it, but then of course, I wouldn’t get to run around Jerusalem, kick doors open, have sex with Anne Heche and save the world.”
There are other things Isaacs jokes he wishes hadn’t wrapped up either. “I think J.K. Rowling made a terrible mistake in not writing twenty or thirty HARRY POTTER films.” More seriously, he continues, “But AWAKE was a different thing. AWAKE was a very interesting premise because it was an open-ended procedural, and yet it was this emotional story with an arc. And I think that was a complicated thing for the writerst to struggle with. The thing that’s great about DIG, and that I love about this this is, [it is a story and] there’s nothing like a story. A story has a beginning, it has a middle and, most importantly, has an end. And those two [Raff and Kring] are master storytellers. They weave this plot. I read this thing; I couldn’t tear my eyes off it. It does what all good stories do. It takes you on a journey, and a journey has an ending. And normally the ending is the most important part. And the thing about open-ended series is, you never get there, and there is a continual frustration with those. So I love telling a proper story. And this is a proper story.”
Isaacs has a few other projects coming up. “I’m in a film called THINGS PEOPLE DO that Syfy [another network in the NBC/Universal family] made, and then another film called STOCKHOLM, PENNSYLVANIA that a woman called Nicole Beckwith made. I’m not sure when it’s coming out, but it’s a beautiful script that I finished just before I started this.”
Is there anything else Isaacs would like to say about DIG? “I hope that people will do what I do, which is enjoy the story tremendously and rush to their computers and find out quite what’s going on in the world, that sinister groups are working to do some terrible, terrible things in our name and with our money.”
By Abbie Bernstein
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