Jason Isaacs is walking back a comment he made on the “White Lotus” press tour regarding his full-frontal scene and “how the sausage is made.”
In an attempt to playfully dodge questions about whether he was wearing a prosthetic or going au naturel in Season 3’s fourth episode, Isaacs told journalists that there is a “double standard” for male actors doing nude scenes and that the media “would never dream” of asking “Anora’s” Mikey Madison or “The Substance” star Margaret Qualley about their genitalia. To his dismay, his remarks made a splash online.
Clarifying his comments, Isaacs tells Variety, “I said the wrong words in the wrong way. I used the phrase ‘double standard,’ which I didn’t mean at all. There is a [different] double standard — women have been monstrously exploited and men haven’t.”
Isaacs, who plays Southern patriarch Timothy Ratliff in the third season of “The White Lotus,” says he tried to deal with questions about his nude scene “lightheartedly” and “brush it away” so that it didn’t become the focus of his interviews about “The White Lotus” or “take away from [creator] Mike White’s brilliance.”
“It came out wrong, and I was tired — I’d done so many interviews,” Isaacs says. “I absolutely should not have mentioned those two actresses, whom I respect enormously. Mikey Madison I’m a massive fan of. My point wasn’t that men have had a harder time than women — that would be absurd. Women have had a monstrous time on camera forever, and I hope to God that is changing.”
Isaacs believes part of the reason White features plenty of penises on “The White Lotus” (there are at least three this season) is to “redress the unfair balance” of nudity on screen. He says “women have been exploited forever in cinema and made to be gratuitously naked and asked totally inappropriate questions.”
Still, he stands by his belief that journalists asking whether his character’s penis is his own is “embarrassing and inappropriate.”
“I had been asked so many times in the same day by journalists, ‘Are you wearing a prosthetic?’ Which means, ‘Have I seen your actual penis? It’s very important for me to know if I’ve seen your penis.’ It just strikes me as a bit weird and slightly obsessive,” Isaacs says. “I thought I could have fun batting it off, but I batted it off very poorly.”
Regardless, Isaacs teases plenty of surprises in the remaining three episodes of “The White Lotus” Season 3 that will surely provide for more interesting discussion than whether he wore a prosthetic.
“Come next week and the week after, I don’t think we’ll be talking about my naked body again,” he says. “There’s plenty of other fabulous stuff coming down the pike.”
From Variety US