As a character, you’re living two lives, which has to be exhausting. As an actor, you’re in just about every scene of this show. Are you equally as exhausted?
JASON ISAACS: I am. I fell asleep during Cherry Jones’ close-up yesterday. I felt very guilty since she’s one of the greatest actresses on the planet. She called me on it, and I tried to bullshit her and pretend that my character was closing his eyes. She went, “No, I saw you fluttering.” I’m physically exhausted, but that’s fine. It’s fun. I go to work at five in the morning and I go home at nine or 10 at night, most days. It’s mentally exhausting because I don’t have an awful lot in my life that parallels this.
Most acting is, “What if?,” acting. It’s pretty easy to find something in your own life that vaguely approximates what your character is going through. You go, “Oh, this is like when my cat died,” or “This is like when I lost my child in the supermarket.” But, I don’t have anything to draw on for, “What if I didn’t know what was a dream and what was real?” So, it’s that much harder to place myself in his shoes, which is all acting is. It’s, “What if I was this guy, in this situation, with these things happening?”
And Britten could be the only person in the world that has this affliction.
ISAACS: Yeah, that’s true. The only reason that I wanted to do this show, and that I hope people find it and like it, is that it’s completely universal. Although he has a unique situation, through that prism, we can explore what it’s like to be a father, what it’s like to be a husband, what it’s like to reboot a marriage, if you didn’t get it right the first time, and what it’s like to explore your subconscious. We’ve all got a subconscious. We’ve all got dreams. We all have fears, anxieties and hopes. In one of those worlds, those are made manifest. He just doesn’t know which one. Hopefully, there’s something very universal, as well as unique, about it.
Source: Full interview @ Collider
Awake - Interview with Jason Isaacs
21 Feb 2012
Cancelled Shows
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Good interview. I just found out that the pilot is available free for early screening on iTunes, and will try to check it out later this week.
ReplyDeleteGetting excited for this show,hope its good
ReplyDeleteThe pilot is on Comcast onDemand as well as on NBC's YouTube also.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupHTy-ICPo
Great interview!
ReplyDeleteMr. Isaacs is one of those actors that owns every role he does no matter the genre. Amazing actor!
The pilot was one of the most intriguing for me this year. It was not as deep or hard to follow as I suspected, but maybe that is as much me following the project for a year now....
Awake is definitely something original and different than anything else on network TV and deserves to not only get a second season, but tell its story for a few years.! Quality TV is rare and should be appreciated when it is around.
I agree, the pilot was very much to my liking. Space, the bottom of the ocean and the brain are the final frontiers that will probably be never be fully understood. I was expecting something a little a deeper because dreams have universal symbols in them but have different meanings as unique as each person. But the premise is great, I have a crack theory that I hope ISN'T right: that he is in a coma and neither of the "realities" are real. He dreams about his wife when she is sitting there and talking to him and he dreams about his son when he is sitting there talking him. Once he decides which reality is real it will lead to his "door" (to borrow just a little from "Being Human". One will lead to heaven and the other will lead back to being with his family. The whole thing about memorizing the constitution is kind of huey because you're brain is a pretty amazing organ (you don't need to memorize, you brain tends to absorb things even if it's in just in the background). You process so many things everyday that your brain just kind of files things away that aren't needed but they are there if you dig deep enough. They also kind of tackled that myth about not being able to read in your dreams. So people can, some people can't. Ummm, geez, now I'm rambling. At rate, I hope it finds it place on NBC and if not, maybe they could throw it to Sy Fy.
ReplyDeleteRight ... and who's to say that his reading was actually the Constitution verbatim.
ReplyDeleteI hope it will get a little deeper and not stay on the edge of delving deep into this mystery.
Either way I think I will enjoy it, but I would enjoy it more if it educated me or confounded me than just some procedural with a twist. Luckily so far it seems like ti will be at least as deep as the pilot which was steps above the traditional procedural for me!
Jason Isaacs is one of the best!
ReplyDeleteLovely interview and if possible made me even more excited for the show.