Jason Isaacs Opens Up About ‘Decades-Long Love Affair with Drugs’

Jason Isaacs is reflecting on his “decades-love affair with drugs.”

While speaking to UK’s The Big Issue for its “Letter to My Younger Self” series, the British actor, who starred as Lucius Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” franchise, recalled his battle with addiction, which began at a young age.

“I’ve always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades-long love affair with drugs,” Isaacs said.

“Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible,” he continued, adding, “No message would get through for nearly 20 years.”

Isaacs, 57, revealed he first got drunk when he was only 12. Although the experience wasn’t pleasant, he said he couldn’t wait to do it again, admitting that he “chased the sheer ecstatic joy” of that night for two decades.

“The barman, who we thought at the time was a hero and I now realize belonged in prison, sneaked us a full bottle of Southern Comfort,” Isaacs explained. “We drank the entire thing in the toilet, then staggered out into the party, reeling around farcically. I vomited, fell on and pulled down a giant curtain, snogged a girl, god bless her… ran out into the street, vomited again, tripped, smashed my head open on the pavement and gushed blood all over my clothes.”

“The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache, stinking of puke with a huge scab and the memory of having utterly shamed myself,” he continued. “All I could think was… I cannot f–king wait to do that again. Why? I’ve no idea. Genes? Nurture? Star sign? I just know I chased the sheer ecstatic joy I felt that night for another 20 years with increasingly dire consequences.”

The “Star Trek: Discovery” star went on to recall a dark time during his battle with addiction in which he believed that if everyone around him died he “probably wouldn’t mind that much” as he would have an “excuse” to do drugs by himself.

“I thought I was broken,” Isaacs said, telling The Big Issue that he “was convinced that nobody came from the same twisted, dark, cracked mold” as he did, per The Sun. “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?”

“I know now that’s not true and never was,” he added. “I love, I feel, I connect, I care. We all do.”

“The drugs weren’t a way of dealing with that sense of distance, the drugs were causing it.”

Isaacs, who shares two daughters with his wife, Emma Hewitt, concluded by sharing what he thinks his younger self would think of what he’s managed to overcome.

“I think what would surprise the 16-year-old me is that I’m okay,” he said. “That I manage to find simple happiness in simple things. Not always, not perfectly, but enough.”

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