Actor Jason Isaacs has openly spoken about the issues his self-confessed 'decades-long love affair with drugs' caused in his relationship with his wife Emma. The Harry Potter star, who is back on our screens tonight in ITV drama Archie about the life of Cary Grant, was just 12 years old when his issues with substance abuse started.
The Lucius Malfoy actor told The Big Issue’s Letter to My Younger Self how a barman had sneaked him and his friends a full bottle of Southern Comfort when he was just 12 years old. He recalled: “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.
“All I could think was I cannot f****** 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 61-year-old actor, who has been sober for over 25 years, also shared a painful memory of the moment when he decided to get clean. He said: “I thought I was broken. I remember there being a moment, not long before I got clean when it occurred to me that if everybody I knew died … 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?’”
Speaking in a moving post about his sobriety on Instagram, Jason revealed the issues his addiction had caused in his marriage to BBC documentary filmmaker wife Emma Hewitt. They met when they were both studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama in the 1980s and were married in 2001 after Jason beat his addictions.
Emma, known for Summer's Lease, Casualty and Harry Enfield's Television Programme, now shares two daughters with Jason. He shared a moving update about his sobriety in 2020, sharing a photo of him and Emma.
He wrote: “My beautiful wife Emma [Hewitt] and I in September 1998 looking pretty happy. We weren’t. Three weeks later, on October 5th, 22 years ago today, I managed 24 hours without taking any drugs or drinking alcohol.
“I’d tried for decades, but was too smart, too capable and too successful to pull it off. Only when I admitted that I needed help did my life change.
"Thank you to every addict and alcoholic who’s ever lifted me up. I love you all – especially the mad ones. Which is most of you. There’s a few 24 hours under my belt now, but it’s only ever one day at a time.”
