Jason Isaacs on Mass: Abortion, God, immigration or Brexit, people are incensed – iNews

Jason Isaacs is a searing presence in his new film, Mass. The camera zeroes in remorselessly on his piercing blue eyes as his character slowly but surely breaks down. Playing Jay, the father of a boy killed by a classmate in a school shooting, Isaacs delivers a brutally raw performance full of rage and loss.

The film focuses with unerring intensity on a face-to-face meeting in a sparsely furnished Episcopal church hall between two sets of parents: Jay and Gail (Martha Plimpton), whose son Evan was shot six years earlier by Hayden, the son of Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd).

There was a real worry going in, Isaacs says. I thought: Well, this is going to be a very powerful experience for the actors, but will it be a piece of self-indulgence where we all get to do lots of crying and emoting?

He neednt have worried. While Mass is undoubtedly grief-stricken, it is also gripping. Encompassing elements of God of Carnage, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Huis Clos, the film is lets not beat about the bush here a gruelling experience. For all that, it would be wrong to say it is unremittingly bleak. By the end, there are glimmers of hope for both couples.

I think the film is very therapeutic because its inspired by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission meetings, Isaacs says.

Its true. Mass has a perhaps unlikely inspiration: Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The work of the late cleric and human rights activist, who won the 1984 Nobel Prize for his campaign against the apartheid regime in South Africa and died on Boxing Day at the age of 90, proved inspirational to writer-director Fran Kranz.

In 1996, Tutu chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a restorative justice body set up to help the country move on from the horrors of apartheid by promoting the idea of forgiveness. The TRC was charged with trying to ensure, in the words of President Cyril Ramaphosa, that justice would prevail over iniquity, and that reconciliation would prevail over revenge and recrimination. It changed the way the world thought about conflict resolution.

Kranz says Mass is about the path forward made possible by the firm belief in the healing power of forgiveness, adding: It has become hard now to imagine how the film could have ever been made without the Archbishop and his profound voice The film is a tribute to him. Id like to believe he would have recognised where it came from and known my endless gratitude.

The point of Mass is to offer some hope in a human-sized bucket, Isaacs agrees. It doesnt have any Hollywood redemption. There are no easy answers to things. But, as they did in those meetings in South Africa, people can take away something positive.

People go into those meetings because their souls have calcified. They are consumed with blame and hatred, or guilt and shame. But by the end, everybody gets something from it, although often not in ways that they expected. They go in with this prescribed list of things that they need to say, but nothing is that neat.

Mass will also strike a chord because it paints a vivid, and all-too-recognisable portrait of a society rent asunder by seemingly unbridgeable splits.

When I first read Mass in 2018 or 2019, Trump was dividing the world, using blame as this extraordinarily divisive tool of hatred, he says. You could feel society becoming increasingly Balkanised, and you could see Trump using division as a weapon to entrench his own power. Whether its abortion or God or immigration, or Brexit for us, there are so many reasons why people are incensed.

Sadly, little has changed since Kranz wrote his script. Families are still divided by all kinds of resentments over vaccines, for example, says Isaacs. And so many people wake up and are filled with hatred and rage for people theyve never met.

Isaacs, 58, has described himself as profoundly Jewish, but not in a religious way. Originally from Liverpool, he moved to London as a child, where his family faced anti-Semitism from the National Front. A longtime Labour supporter, he has been outspoken about allegations of anti-Semitism in the party, and at the last general election he campaigned for former Labour MP Luciana Berger as she attempted to become a Liberal Democrat MP.

He tells me he has fears about how polarised the UK has become. Even before the pandemic and the isolation that brought, the lack of human connection allowed poison and hatred to fester, he says. Ive seen it myself. Ive done some charity work with the Red Cross around refugees and asylum seekers, and Ive come across supposedly progressive, left-leaning friends of mine, lovely actors, with some of the most reactionary attitudes based on lies and ignorance.

They dont know any refugees. They havent met any of the people that Ive been privileged enough to meet who have been held as slaves in Yemen for a year and fled slaughter and only want to work and give back to the country that has sheltered them and provided them with a port in a storm.

If those friends of mine met those refugees, they would never think those things. People make judgements based on things theyve read or fill in the gaps with the worst parts of their own imagination.

Isaacs is keen to stress that Mass is not a worthy film: It all sounds very virtuous, but it is actually delivered as a kind of psychological thriller. Four people are going into a room what the hell is going to happen next?

What distinguishes Mass, in Isaacs eyes, is the skill of the writing. What makes us recognisably human is that we dont know ourselves very well. My character, for instance, arrives in the room expecting to manage the meeting. He thinks hes there as some kind of puppet master. Layers are peeled off in the room, and people are revealed to themselves in ways that are ultimately cathartic and offer some hope.In the end, Isaacs thinks, Mass is a powerful plea for human connection. That plea has probably been magnified by the isolation weve all felt during the pandemic. If Mass bleeds over into anywhere else in your life, the film is suggesting we should try not to pre-judge other people.

The only way we can heal and be reconciled is if we see each other as human beings and dont rush to pre-judgement. Its how peace in Northern Ireland was eventually established by grassroots organisations making contact and seeing each other as people.

Fran is saying: Let me imagine the worst possible situation for a parent. If I was in that situation, would I ever be able to forgive? What is the possibility and the power of forgiveness? Thats what this film is talking about.

Isaacs himself has two daughters with his wife, the documentary maker Emma Hewitt. As a parent, Isaacs admits that the role demanded that he go to some tough places. I was scared to take the job on in the first place. I didnt know if Id be up to it. We needed to trust the other people to be as vulnerable as possible and to risk revealing ourselves.

Isaacs stayed in his impeccable American accent throughout the two-week shoot. His is a riveting performance in an already impressively diverse CV. The actor has played roles from the shouty General Georgy Zhukov in The Death of Stalin to the increasingly defeated Harry H Corbett in The Curse of Steptoe (for which he won a Bafta nomination).

He is still best known, however, as the villainous Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films. He had a whale of a time. It was such a joy to play Lucius, he says. It was a blessed relief to be able to be such an unalloyed and deliciously evil character, to get on that blond wig and snarl and mince around and be filled with unqualified bile.

Recently, he appeared in the reunion film, Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts. Being part of the Potter-verse, he says, continues to be a joy, because there are new generations constantly discovering and loving the books and films.

Still, he never gets recognised. The actors who do look like their characters in Harry Potter get stopped in the street every day. But that wig has been the best possible thing. I dont look like Malfoy thank God!

Mass is released on Sky Cinema and in cinemas on Thursday

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Jason Isaacs on Mass: Abortion, God, immigration or Brexit, people are incensed - iNews