Jason Isaacs says ‘Harry Potter’ director told him to ‘pull back’ accent by ’80 to 90 percent’

Jason Isaacs summoned an accent that was much too jarring for director Chris Columbus on set of the Harry Potter movies.

Appearing on the latest episode of The Tonight Show to chat about his recent stay at The White Lotus in Thailand, the English actor revisited one of his more memorable roles as Lucius Malfoy. Isaacs, it turns out, was instrumental in creating the look and sound of the character — namely, his menacing aristocratic British accent. Columbus, however, wasn’t too keen on it.

“I came up with a voice, I thought the most irritating voice I could think of, that made you just hear a syllable and want to punch him,” Isaacs recalled. “I tried it out in the first rehearsal and Chris Columbus went, ‘Okay, Jason, look . . I’m American, but has there ever been anybody in the world in England or anywhere that ever spoke like that?’ I said, ‘No, but it’s a film about wizards, after all.'”

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Columbus was skeptical, until Daniel Radcliffe, who played the titular boy wizard, “God bless him, said, “I think it’s kind of cool, actually. I think people will do that in playgrounds,” Isaacs said. “Chris went, ‘Alright, let’s go with that.’ And every take we did after that for the next couple of films, couple of years, Chris would come up and go, ‘Fantastic. It’s wonderful. Let’s do one more, [but] could you pull back on the accent like 80, 90%?”

Isaacs made his debut as Lucius Malfoy in the franchise’s second film, 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and continued to appear until the final entry, 2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. He most recently swapped that menacing accent for a heavily-debated Southern one in The White Lotus season 3, starring as a Durham patriarch who nearly poisons his family with spiked piña coladas in order to shield them from his legal troubles.

“It’s Durham,” Isaacs told Esquire of the divisive cadence in an interview published last month. “It’s very specific. The Internet exploded with people going, ‘This is the worst accent I’ve ever heard in my life.’ But then there’s also people from Durham commenting, ‘Spot-on.’ Or, ‘What are you talking about? He sounds exactly like my dad, or my dentist, or my swim coach.’ So I feel slightly validated.”

Watch Isaacs’ full chat with Jimmy Fallon above.