The Big Picture

• Jason Isaacs perfectly captures Cary Grant's accent in Archie, thanks to a rare interview transcript that gave insight into Grant's intonation and speech patterns.
• Isaacs delved into the depths of Grant's character, understanding his complex upbringing and the reasons behind his controlling and cruel behavior.
• Isaacs found commonalities with Grant, such as the experience of code-switching and the desire to please, which helped him bring the character to life on screen.

Jason Isaacs has a long history of playing charming, yet difficult men, ranging from downright villains to more complex and flawed characters. It's a skill set that made him uniquely suited for the role of Cary Grant in the new biographical series Archie. While the world knew Cary Grant for the roles he took on in Hollywood, those closest to him knew a very different man. He could be controlling and downright cruel, but as Isaacs keenly stated during our interview, "hurt people hurt people." Grant's upbringing shaped him into the man he became—for better and for worse—and this is the story that the BritBox series sets out to explore: the evolution from Archie Leach to the Hollywood heartthrob named Cary Grant.

Archie showcases the full expanse of Cary Grant's life, starting with a young Archie Leach (Dainton Anderson) and progressing on to his adolescence through performances by Oaklee Pendergast and Theo Sharpe. Once Isaacs steps into his sharply tailored suits and debonair, there's so much more to his story to explore. It's here that we learn about his whirlwind of divorces as he chases after the rising starlet Dyan Cannon (Laura Aikman) who wants very little to do with him, at first. Their relationship, as flawed as it was, is the anchor for much of Archie's plot, and the source of most of the more dynamic and intriguing elements of the series.

Speaking with Collider, Jason Isaacs spoke about the process of finding Cary Grant's iconic Mid-Atlantic accent, the rare interview he was able to track down that allowed him to find the exact intonation of Grant's voice, and how he connected to Grant through the transformation of fatherhood. Isaacs also spoke briefly about voicing Enver Gortash in Baldur's Gate 3. Check out all of this and so much more in the video at the top of the article, or in the full transcript below.

COLLIDER: I'm really excited to talk with you about Archie. Something I was really fascinated with while watching it was how pitch-perfect your Cary Grant accent is. I was really blown away by that. I would love to know what went into your dialect process for training for this.

JASON ISAACS: You always feel a bit embarrassed to talk about how the sausage is made. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff to do with him trying to look and walk and talk and sound like him. Does it take away from the audience knowing how it's built? I'm not sure. It's a bit like giving a magic trick away. Most of what makes me look a bit more like him than me is just brilliant makeup and hair from Liz Hedley and of the costumes and all the tailors and all that stuff. But I was a little bit frightened at the voice, obviously, because people think they know what his voice was like. They’re wrong. Most people are remembering Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, who's doing a parody, and other people who did mimicry and stuff, which wasn't really him at all, as an exaggeration.

Nonetheless, I watched the films and I just went, and I worked with a dialect coach, and we broke him down. He was doing some strange, identical musical pattern every time he spoke. Literally an identical intonation pattern. I thought, “Nobody talks like that.” When you spill your coffee in your lap in the morning, there's no way you go, “I look very familiar.” There's literally a musical thing. So, I searched in vain for an interview. I couldn't find, anywhere, the equivalent of this, somewhere where he was having a chat with someone. There just wasn't anything. Jennifer [Grant], god bless her, gave me all the DVDs and audiotapes he'd made, but that was him doing what I did obsessively, which is filming his kid, just in case [he spoke into] the microphone, but mostly not. And I was slightly despairing about it, not knowing how to proceed.

And then, because I was doing a lot of other research, reading all the biographies and business meeting minutes and other people's autobiographies when they met him, I came across this interview that felt like a transcript. Sometimes I give an interview and I read it, and I go, “Couldn't you tidy my grammar up? It's clear that you're just transcribing my own looping syntax and stuff.” And I thought, “That's a transcript.” I tried to find the journalist, but he wasn't a journalist, and it was old. I found him, and it turned out he'd been a student journalist in 1986, and he'd gotten in touch with Cary Grant’s representative. He hadn't been an actor for 20-odd years, so he wrote to someone in the vain hope that maybe he could get an interview because the university was doing a film festival, and he got a message back saying, “Call this number on Saturday morning.” So he called on Saturday morning, Barbara answered, and he went, “Hello?” And they went, “Hold on! I'll just get Cary,” and Cary Grant came on the phone.

Well, he was at the university radio department to make this call, and the first thing Cary Grant says is, “You're not recording this, are you? You better not be.” And he goes, “Well, I was going to.” He goes, “No, don’t. I don’t want you to. I just don't like it.” He said, “Alright,” and he gestured to his friend to stop, and then they had this hour-long conversation roaming all over the place, very interesting. Then at the end, when he got off the phone, his friend went, “I mean, obviously I did record it,” and he went, “What?” He said, “Yeah, I'm not gonna stop the interview.” He hadn't played it to anyone in 40 years. I tracked him down, and I begged him, and he said, “Who are you? Why do you want it?” He was very suspicious and very cautious, and I persuaded him that I was authentic, and I wouldn't play it to anyone else because, out of respect to Cary Grant, he hadn't made it public, and he set up a private YouTube link. And that is the basis for the voice.

So, he's a little bit more English than he is in the films, but much more importantly, you can hear something like the speech patterns, it's much more wide-ranging. Actually, it’s much more plaintive sometimes, slightly higher in pitch sometimes. I've worked with movie stars who come in and redo their voice an octave down, you know? He’s got quite a high, fluttery laugh. And then, I could hear a sense of being misunderstood. I mean, he was 82. It was the last year of his life, and he’s talking to a 22-year-old, but still, sometimes he gave status to the 22-year-old because he was a bit bothered by him not understanding, or not respecting him. I could hear the fault lines, basically. I could hear the human being stretching all the way back to the abused and neglected boy, and I heard a man who was settled at that point in his life – a whole bunch of colors that you didn't get from the movie. So, that was my lodestar. I used that as my touchstone throughout filming, and I had it in my ears all the time when I needed a brush-up.

Jason Isaacs Explains the Connections He Found Between Cary Grant and Himself

That's remarkable, and it really comes across in the series. Something I also thought was interesting, both you and Cary Grant have a connection to Bristol. You went to the University of Bristol, he was born in Bristol. Did you find as you were doing your character research that you had little touchstones, other little commonalities with him, that helped you bring him to life on screen?

ISAACS: Sure, I always do that. As an actor, one of the great things about this is very rarely as a male actor you get to do a full chameleon disguise. Women get to do it often, but men just don't get to do it. So, there was something almost like mask work by looking so different, walking and talking so different. But you always find things that you have in common. So, the fact that he code-switched, the fact that he became whoever he felt other people wanted him to be so that they would like him because he felt so unlovable. He'd been so neglected, so abandoned and abused. Well, I didn't feel that growing up. My behavior as an adult wasn't as extreme as his was either, but I moved when I was a kid, and I was very self-conscious about my accent like he was. I changed my accent overnight. I went to college surrounded by very, very posh people; I changed my accent overnight there, too. I wasn’t quite sure, often in groups, where I belonged or if I belonged, and would want to belong so badly that I would somehow adapt my personality.

He was a male escort when he was in New York. He learned to be whoever he needed to be to survive. Not just survive literally — because he was starving a lot, he was hungry a lot in his life — but also to survive emotionally, to feel like maybe this would be the family where he belonged, maybe this time it would be a thing where he could be welcome to establish himself. So, I recognize that code-switching thing. He's an actor, so that desire to please, that dissonance between who he was on screen and who he was in life… I've played lots of tough guys, while I'm hilariously untough. You couldn't get more of a physical [response].

Then most of all, I think, in terms of the big sweep of his life, that he found himself. He began to find himself when he became a dad. No one ever loved him enough because he knew, somewhere, that they would eventually leave him like his mother had left him, like his father had left him, like his grandmother. So whatever love he got from people, and he got the worship of most of the world, that felt fake. He felt like he didn't deserve it. And the people in his inner circle just couldn't love him enough until he had someone he could love. Then he started to find real healing through going, “I belong here. Whatever else I am anywhere else, I don't really know if any of that's real — what people think of me, what I think of them — but this place right here next to this person, I will always belong.” [Pauses] I’m getting a bit emotional. I felt that when my daughter arrived. “This is where I will always belong. I always belong to her.”

Oh, that's very sweet. It's very hard to segue off of that because it was such a poignant answer, but something that actors get asked a lot is, “What do you bring of yourself to a role?” I'm curious, with how larger than life Cary Grant is in that way that he is trying to always adapt and be whoever somebody needs in a moment, were there any aspects to Cary that you felt stuck with you after you wrapped?

ISAACS: Oh, Christ, no. I’ve played a lot of murderers, as well, and space captains. No, he was a deeply troubled man. If he was around today and was humble enough to seek help, he would have every single acronym labeled to his file. It'd be OCD, ADHD, PTSD, AA, you name it. All of it. So, my job is to try and forget myself. Some actors aren't like this. My job is to try as much as possible to make a clean slate of myself to program in everything that had ever happened to him, all the things he wanted and needed and thought and felt, and then to start the scene and forget everything. You can't be thinking about that. I'm not thinking about my past. I'm a product of my past, but I’m not thinking about it.

So, you hope that if you do all the work, somewhere, maybe in your sleep or maybe while you're doing some other things, it's bubbling and you're building these temporary foundations that will hold for the length of the shoot. Then, do the scenes. It's written monthly by Jeff [Pope], and I had Dyan [Cannon’s] ear all the time, or Dyan had my ear, and then I'm opposite the brilliant Laura Aikman. Laura Aikman, who played young Dyan, who was so nimble and on her toes and so fresh in every scene. She spoke to Dyan separately, I speak to Dyan, and you didn't really know what the other person was gonna do in the scene, if they’d be happy, sad, angry, crying, laughing, avoiding you, like marriage. Like life. And so having done all the work, I forgot it and lived in the scenes. I'm the kind of actor that forgets myself entirely. I like forgetting myself entirely, so I don't think I brought much of myself to it, and I don't think I brought any of it home. My wife and kids wouldn't put up with it, nor would the dog.

That’s probably for the best with how Cary Grant was.

ISAACS: You know what they say, hurt people hurt people. Well, he was really damaged, really badly damaged. Although, he could fake it well for the world, even fake it well for some of the people in his life, like the way that he wooed and seduced Dyan Cannon over the course of a long period of time. He was older than her dad. She just wasn't interested, really, but eventually, he won her over. And then as soon as he got her, as he said to her agent on the phone, “She's not coming out of this house until she's broken.”

It’s definitely very interesting to see these men that we put up on pedestals, this really helps to kind of break that down and be like, “They're just like anybody else, troubled and having flaws.”

ISAACS: Well, like everyone else but worse. The more famous, the more they need to be famous — I'd say, probably, by the way, not just men — anybody who needs and drives with that level of force and passion to getting famous, the more likely it is that the fault lines and the cracks are enormous.

Jason Isaacs Talks About Voicing Enver Gortash in 'Baldur's Gate 3'

I agree completely. As we wind down on this interview, I did want to ask about one other project of yours that came out this year that everybody's talking about, which is Baldur's Gate 3. You voiced Lord Enver Gortash. That game has occupied far too much of my time this year…

ISAACS: [Laughs] You play, do you?

I am curious, what was the process like for that and doing that voice role?

ISAACS: I do lots of voices. I love voices. In fact, one of the things I love about playing Archie is that I got to do something very different from myself because normally I don't get to do those things. So on voice work, I can be anything, I can sound like anyone. They show you a picture, and you go, “Wow, I wish I looked like that. How great!” In the DC Universe, for instance, I've been Superman, and Ra’s al Ghul, and Lex Luthor, and Alfred, and many people.

So with Gortash, it was not a game I played—I'm such an addict; I can't allow myself to play video games or else I'd have no life—but they showed me this fabulous artwork, and I knew it was a big game. He's an interesting bloke. It's a pretty brutal world. It's a pretty Darwinian world and you gotta try and survive, and so though he's very manipulative and possibly untrustworthy, and Machiavellian, and all those things, he's a survivor. He's doing what it takes to grab power in a power-seeking world. So, it was nice to be that cunning and manipulative. It felt like playing Iago slightly; he has power but he wants power, and he's got to play these other people off against each other. But yeah, it was great.

Not only do you get to do that stuff, unlike on a film set, you get to record 100 versions of it. It was sessions over the course of years. They go away and animate and come back, and go away and animate and come back, and do new things and other things. So, you really get to play and explore. There are a million permutations as you play the game, that you'll come across, so you get to feel fully immersed in something. I love video games.

The first two episodes of Archie are streaming now on BritBox. Check out the trailer below while you wait for the final episodes to drop on December, 14th: