Monday, August 21, 2000
The University Daily Kansan
Section D·Page 19
Patriot villain differs from true self
By Douglas J. Rowe Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK — Get him off his steed and out of his redcoat, and the summer movie season's most cold-hearted villain comes across as the world's nicest guy.
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During a conversation, he's sweet, solicitous and speaks softly — about how it's been too long since he visited his parents, how he alienated his longtime girlfriend, and how when it comes to dividing the world between the bullies and the bullied he most assuredly is among the latter.
Jason Isaacs plays the baddest of the bad in *The Patriot*, British Col. William Tavington, who has enemy wounded shot and townspeople immolated in a burning church.
Even pans of Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War-era action film praised Isaacs.
“It’s the best part in the film as far as I'm concerned,” he says more seriously, giving credit to screenwriter Robert Rodat, who also wrote Saving Private Ryan.
“It’s all in the writing. So it doesn't go to my head at all.”
A movie is only as good as its villain, he notes, because the hero, particularly one played by Gibson, has a certain invulnerability; you have to give him a
challenge — raise a little doubt that he might fall.
Isaacs frets that his logrolling comments — about how great the movie is, how great it was to work on it, how delightful working with the actors and director was — are going to sound every bit as phony as when others utter them.
"It's strange to find myself saying the kinds of things that I read other actors say in interviews, and I know they don't mean it, and I do, and I don't quite know how to express the fact that I mean it."
"Tarleton, as opposed to Tavington, was so successful in all of his campaigns — he was a fantastically successful soldier — very often outnumbered 5-to-1, 10-to-1, which told me something. It told me he had a kind of mad death wish. He would ride into battles that he really shouldn't be riding into, and win them."
To Isaacs, it also helped explain how his character might cross the threshold and commit atrocities.
Tavington is loosely based on the real-life Col. Banestre Tarleton, and studying him helped Isaacs avoid stepping over into cartoon villainy.
"He's a man trying to win the war ... And anytime that you get
involved in the kind of moral chaos that war is you flick a switch in your head and the enemy is subhuman, and when the enemy is subhuman you can do anything. And like he says in the film, "The honor is found in the end, not the means."
But Isaacs would disagree with someone who says his character personifies unadulterated evil. "You see him humiliated by his boss. You see him well up with tears."
Historians say there's no evidence that Tarleton was involved in infanticide or incidents such as the church arson and murders, and the savagery of Isaacs' character has drawn complaints, especially in Britain.
"You know there are all sorts of glorious, gallant war heroes in America and England whose deeds don't bear too close a scrutiny," he says, citing the example of Arthur "Bomber" Harris, who directed the bombing of Dresden during World War II. "If you ask the residents of Dresden how much of a war hero he is, you have a very different story."
While his villainous roles have been most memorable, Isaacs says he's played a broader range of parts than people have noticed.
"In Armageddon I was the smartest man on the planet. I
saved the entire world. I came up with the plan to blow up the asteroid from the inside. No one gave me a thank-you. Not so much as a phone call, or a bunch of flowers," he jokes.
"You go out and slaughter whole villages, and suddenly you get a lot of attention."
Isaacs played a priest in The End of the Affair and you can see him as a drag queen in his next movie, Sweet November. His other film includes Soldier.
He just wrapped his latest film, which co-stars Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron. "Just hung up my high heels and my bra," he says, drvly.
After learning how to load and fire muskets and to ride a horse, he says he had to learn entirely new skills for Sweet November: "It's impossible to pull your pantyhose up with long false nails on. I had to go to the bathroom and I sometimes called for help to be able to pull my pantyhose up. It was very embarrassing."
Meanwhile, he says his girlfriend of 12-1/2 years — documentarian Emma Hewitt — is repelled by his shaved chest and underarms and won't go near him.
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"I'm hoping it will grow back as fast as possible."
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