Jason Isaacs has recently talked about his mental health issues, revealing his past struggles with drug addiction in an interview with The Big Issue.
Isaacs, who played Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter film series, said, “I’ve always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades-long love affair with drugs.”
“Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible,” he added. “No message would get through for nearly 20 years.”
The 57-year-old actor said he first got drunk at the age of 20 and the experience led to his addiction problem.
Isaacs recalled, “The barman, who we thought at the time was a hero and I now realize belonged in prison, sneaked us a full bottle of Southern Comfort. We drank the entire thing in the toilet, then staggered out into the party, reeling around farcically. I vomited, fell on and pulled down a giant curtain, snogged a girl, god bless her… ran out into the street, vomited again, tripped, smashed my head open on the pavement and gushed blood all over my clothes.”
“The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache, stinking of puke with a huge scab and the memory of having utterly shamed myself,” he continued. “All I could think was… I cannot f******* wait to do that again. Why? I’ve no idea. Genes? Nurture? Star sign?”
“I just know I chased the sheer ecstatic joy I felt that night for another 20 years with increasingly dire consequences,” he added.
Isaacs explained that he thought he “was broken” while struggling with the addiction.
He said, “I remember there being a moment, not long before I got clean, when it suddenly occurred to me that if everybody I knew died, literally every single person, I probably wouldn’t mind that much,” he shared. “In fact, I might like it, because then it would be an excuse to sit in a room by myself and take drugs and everybody else would say, ‘Well you know, fair enough, you heard what happened didn’t you?’”
He went on to say that he realized “that’s not true and never was. I love, I feel, I connect, I care. We all do. The drugs weren’t a way of dealing with that sense of distance, the drugs were causing it.”
Isaacs said he has been overcoming his issues. “I think what would surprise the 16-year-old me is that I’m okay,” he said. “That I manage to find simple happiness in simple things. Not always, not perfectly, but enough.”
