Q+A: Jason Isaacs, actor (Skew)

Jason Isaacs is a fixture on just about every conceivable screen, whether in cinemas in The JDeath Of Stalin or on TV in Star Trek: Discovery. But his resume also includes many videogames, including Marvel’s Midnight Suns, El Shaddai, the 2016 reboot of Hitman – and now The Last Worker, in which he plays your robotic companion, Skew. Sitting down with Isaacs in a plush BAFTA screening room, conversation wanders from unexpected character accents to the end of the world.

This is far from the first time you’ve acted in a videogame, but what was it that attracted you to this project in particular?

Jörg Tittel, who created the game, is one of the most insane people I’ve ever met. He has creative ideas that are completely unrealisable. And then he realises them. I met him first because he did a graphic novel called Rickey Rouse Has A Gun and wanted to make a liveaction movie of it. It seemed like he’d be taking on the Chinese government and copyright laws and Disney – but, actually, we nearly made it. And then the pandemic came. Jörg said, “I’ve got this idea”, and I was like, “Well, that’s even madder than Ricky Rouse”. But it was the end of the world as we knew it. We were all in lockdown, all in isolation – it felt like nothing would ever be the same again. And maybe we were fiddling while Rome burned, but we had a good time recording our dialogue. Even though we were all locked in our homes, we were able to do something very unusual. We recorded together – we were connected digitally, across the world. I’ve done a lot of animation and videogames in my life, and you always record solo. The only other time I’ve ever actually been in a studio with other actors was Star Wars Rebels. [Ólafur Darri Ólafsson] and I knew each other already, and we got to improvise a lot, and [that produced] all these ideas – for instance, the notion of making Skew, my character, Scouse.