‘I thought I was broken’: Jason Isaacs opens up about addiction battle

Jason Isaacs opened up about his struggle with addiction, revealing that he first got drunk at the age of 12 and went on to have “a decades long love affair with drugs.”

He told the The Big Issue on Monday: “I thought I was broken. 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.

“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?”

The 57 year-old said his teenage self would be surprised that he is now “okay. That I manage to find simple happiness in simple things. Not always, not perfectly, but enough.”

Isaacs, born in Liverpool to Jewish parents who have since moved to Israel, is perhaps best known for playing Lucius Malfoy in all eight Harry Potter films. He has spoken at length about growing up in the Jewish community, and his experience with antisemitism as a Jewish teenager in London.

“There were constantly people beating us up or smashing windows,” he told the Independent in 2013 about his upbringing in the Liverpool suburb of Childwall. “If you were ever, say, on a Jewish holiday, identifiably Jewish, there was lots of violence around.