‘Harry Potter’ star Jason Isaacs calls Lucius Malfoy a ‘racist’ with ‘a little s—‘ son

Jason Isaacs always strives to get inside the heads of his characters, even when he loathes them.

The White Lotus star recently reflected on the six films in the Harry Potter franchise in which he starred as Lucius Malfoy, the arrogant father of villain Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and a staunch believer in the superiority of so-called “pure blood” wizards.

“My job wasn’t being in a franchise. My job was trying to explain to the audience why Draco was such a little s— at school,” Isaacs said on Monday’s episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast, taking umbrage with the consumerist connotations of the term “franchise.”

“He came from a loveless home, and I came from a long, unbroken chain of loveless parenting,” Isaacs continued. “And to play that popinjay and that racist, it might be magical, but the parallels are pretty transparent: someone who doesn’t think that Muggles should mix blood with wizards, and somebody trying to make Hogwarts great again.”

Isaacs said he’s “repulsed” when the term “franchise” is used to describe the Potter films. “As much as it was fantastical, I always take the acting incredibly seriously,” he explained.

As an example, Isaacs offered the scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I “when [Ralph Fiennes] was around bullying me as Voldemort, humiliating me, and snapping my wand at my table, [it] felt like being castrated in front of my family. It was heartbreaking and humiliating. I don’t know how to phone a performance in, really. That felt like serious acting. It didn’t feel like we were in something silly.”

Though Lucius’ cruelly precocious prodigy takes up far more space in the films and in the books from which they were adapted, Lucius proves far more sinister when all is said and done. He gleefully joins the Death Eaters, for example, a violent, pure-blood supremacist group that perpetrates atrocities, attaining the second-in-command post beside the ultimate evil, Lord Voldemort.

But Isaacs still put the same effort into rendering Malfoy as believable as he would “when I was doing plays at Edinburgh Festival.”

Effort doesn’t always neatly translate to enjoyment, however.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

“It’s a terrible confession to make: They weren’t that much fun to make,” he revealed in a 2023 interview. “It’s quite boring making big special effects films; however, the pleasures all come afterward. I see and meet people for whom their lives were changed by it, and still people reading it and sharing it with their children. Some people say their lives were saved by it, and I believe it.”

You can listen to the rest of Isaacs’ interview on the Awards Chatter podcast above.