Jason Isaacs

We’re back in the UK, and we have an acting legend joining us this week - it’s Jason Isaacs! Jason had already been in touch earlier in the week to apologise for ‘being a vegan who doesn’t like vegetables’! But no bother! We cooked up a storm and we love a challenge. And Jason more than made up for it with his excellent table chat; we heard about working with Gillian Anderson on their new film ‘The Salt Path’, filming White Lotus, how he married his wife for the health insurance, his encounter with a ghost, turning down West End shows, and we discover that men who are vegan have better erections… Plus Jason even treats us to a magic trick, the must see video will be on our socials this week. Don’t miss Jason’s beautiful new film The Salt Path, which is out in cinemas this Friday the 30th May. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

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• 0:35Jessie Ware?

  Hello and welcome to Table Manners. I'm Jessie Ware and I'm here with Mum and you're looking glorious in a striped. Would you call that Breton?

• 0:42Speaker 03

  It is of a Breton range.

• 0:45Jessie Ware?

  Of a range, what?

• 0:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's sea salt, actually.

• 0:47Jessie Ware?

  Oh, how are you, Mum?

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Poor M&S, don't even talk to them. Don't go there. I had to go to Colliers Wood this week.

• 0:55Jessie Ware?

  Oh my goodness.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  But I realised I have an M&S addiction and it's dreadful not being able to order online. Please, M&S, sort it out.

• 1:02Jessie Ware?

  For people that don't know what Mum's talking about, M&S have been cyber attacked.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  And they're not taking online orders.

• 1:08Jessie Ware?

  So you actually have to schlep to?

• 1:09Speaker 03

  I have to schlep to Colliers Wood. It was quite interesting.

• 1:12Jessie Ware?

  Where's Colliers Wood?

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Right beyond Tooting. There's a big area, it's got loads of shops. It's kind of fantastic because it's got a huge M&S. It's got necks, boots, all of those sorts of things in Colliers Wood.

• 1:24Jessie Ware?

  Okay, well, we have, we haven't recorded for a while, have we?

• 1:29Speaker 03

  No, I want to talk about. First of all, thank you, Ravinda Bhabha, for inviting me to the launch of the Jaconi.

• 1:35Jessie Ware?

  At Fortnum and Mason's.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  At Fortnum's, oh my goodness.

• 1:38Jessie Ware?

  So good. What have I been doing? I've been working on music. I have been eating out a lot of really great restaurants.

• 1:47Speaker 03

  I've seen them, I know.

• 1:48Jessie Ware?

  Oh, I sung with the Scissor Sisters at the weekend in Glasgow. Most incredible show.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Was it fun?

• 1:53Jessie Ware?

  And great crowd, just amazing. Scissor Sisters are brilliant. You can listen to Jake on our podcast. Jake Shears was on a few years ago and has such a beautiful story about the song Mary. Um, so we have Jason Isaacs coming on today, who people will know from being Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter, uh, he was in The Patriot.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  He was in The Death of Stalin, one of my favourites.

• 2:17Jessie Ware?

  Obviously, the new White Lotus series, quite a fab storyline in that. And we are talking to him about his new film that he's in, which is a bestselling book.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  I've read the book.

• 2:29Jessie Ware?

  Did you?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31Jessie Ware?

  When?

• 2:31Speaker 03

  A long time ago.

• 2:32Jessie Ware?

  Okay, so the book is called The Salt Path and it's by Rayna Nguyen and it's about Rayna and her husband, Moth, losing everything and being homeless and deciding to just walk the coastline.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  I'd never really worked out, I might ask him, what was the impetus behind walking the coastline, what made them do that?

• 2:52Jessie Ware?

  They had this book, didn't they?

• 2:54Speaker 03

  They had a book, but I don't know what gave them the urge or motivation to do it, so I might ask him that.

• 3:00Jessie Ware?

  But the character, the, the character, the man that is still alive, that Jason plays, is called Moth and he has this degenerative disease and so he's completely brilliant in the film.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:12Jessie Ware?

  He was absolutely amazing.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  I thought he was.

• 3:14Jessie Ware?

  And it's a really touching film, it's with Gillian Anderson, who plays Rayna, another former guest, and it's quite a gentle film and it's quite peaceful and.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  I couldn't work out how they went that far with such small rucksacks.

• 3:27Jessie Ware?

  I know.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  With, with their clothing.

• 3:29Jessie Ware?

  Imagine.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Actually, Gillian wore a top that was the same material as a pair of trousers of mine.

• 3:36Jessie Ware?

  Oh, fabulous, well, let's talk to Jason Isaacs about this.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  I'm going to ask him about that.

• 3:40Jessie Ware?

  Um, now, we got Jason's dieteries in.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Well, I think he's going to be my favourite vegan ever.

• 3:46Jessie Ware?

  Okay, so, you know, we love vegans, by the way.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do.

• 3:50Jessie Ware?

  We, mum is completely.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  And we don't mind fussy eaters at all, do we, darling?

• 3:54Jessie Ware?

  No, we don't, um, but we got told that Jason didn't have any dieteries and then we got told that Jason did, in fact, he was a vegan that didn't like. Um, a lot of things.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Just.

• 4:07Jessie Ware?

  So we were like, okay, right, what are we gonna do? Now, one way to shut Lenny and I up is to deliver the most charming email ahead of saying that you have quite challenging dieteries. So this is what we got. We got an email from Jason Isaacs. Hi ladies, Jason here. The other side of the world, on my knees in Marygold's, cleaning up my mate's flat I've been staying in. The glamour, the filth. I'm really looking forward to sitting down and yakking next week, but I wanted to give you a heads up that I'm a total fucking nightmare to cook for. Genuinely, I'm so, so sorry. If it's any consolation, I don't shut up, so you two can just munch away and point me at a mic. I'd be really happy with a bowl of crisps and a jam sandwich, or we could get Deliveroo.

• 4:50Jessie Ware?

  However, if you are gonna torture yourselves, I'll wash up honest. Here's the nightmare made flesh. I'm a vegan for a start. I could stop there, obviously, as that's bad enough, and I hate it. Why are you a vegan then, mate?

• 5:01Speaker 03

  We'll ask you.

• 5:02Jessie Ware?

  Okay. Um, but I'm madly fussy like a toddler too. I basically only ever ate meat and potatoes my whole life till a few years ago, so I don't like most vegetables. Um, which ones I hear you groan, I'll tell you. Here is the list, guys. Corgettes, celery, in brackets, and its nasty cousin, celeriac. Okay. Fennel, asparagus, cucumber, brackets, I know, I know, it's a fruit, I'm an actor, not David Attenborough. Olives, capers, definitely other stuff, I can't remember. Well, now I'm scared that he doesn't like tomatoes, so fingers crossed, everybody. Quite partial to a bit of tofu in any context, because I have to be, and all the really shit-for-you fake meat products that'll kill you quicker than smoking. And spicy stuff, especially if you need chopsticks to eat it. Jews and Chinese food, what is that about?

• 5:47Jessie Ware?

  Bet you wish you'd never asked me now, don't you? Nonetheless, I can't wait to meet you. Um, so yeah, we were like, oh, you're forgiven, it's fine. So, I gave him three options, because I was just like, look, let's just make this simple. So I gave him three options, and one of them was mushroom lamajins. So lamajins are Turkish kind of pizzas. You have them, and they're so delicious, and they have kind of minced meat and pepper on them, and onions, and they're delicious.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Do you say it, lamajins?

• 6:18Jessie Ware?

  I don't, my Turkish best mates say lamajin. Anyway, we're having lamajin, um, for, um, sorry to all the Turks that are listening, um. But mushrooms, so instead of the minced meat, we're having grated mushrooms. And then I've made some homemade babaganoush. I've made homemade hummus with crispy shallots on top. And then I've also tried to make homemade flatbreads. But I have got a backup of M and S flatbreads because mine look quite.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  No, they look great. They look rustic, don't they?

• 6:51Jessie Ware?

  But I don't know.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  They look fab.

• 6:53Jessie Ware?

  So that's what we've got.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Thanks for cooking, darling.

• 6:55Jessie Ware?

  It's all right. And then my son made some vegan cookies yesterday. That I thought we could do vegan cookie ice cream sandwiches.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Have you got ice cream?

• 7:03Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Vegan?

• 7:05Jessie Ware?

  Yeah. So that is what he's getting. So fingers crossed, everybody.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  You've got a new lemon jug.

• 7:09Jessie Ware?

  I know, it's really sweet, isn't it?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Lovely.

• 7:11Jessie Ware?

  I've even put a tablecloth down today.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Why did you do that?

• 7:14Jessie Ware?

  Because my friend sent it to me and I think it looks really pretty.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Gorgeous.

• 7:17Jessie Ware?

  Jason Isaacs coming up on Table Morning.

• 7:27Jessie Ware?

  Jason Isaacs, thank you very much for being here.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Well, you say that now.

• 7:30Jessie Ware?

  Well, yeah, I mean, listen, you charmed us with that email.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Oh, thanks very much. My apologetic email that maybe the people at home should know that I don't eat anything.

• 7:39Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  I hate food now because I went vegan, so now there's no pleasure left in life.

• 7:43Jessie Ware?

  I've got a lot of questions for you.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  And I hate all vegetables.

• 7:46Jessie Ware?

  So, okay, firstly.

• 7:48Speaker 04

  No, I'm going to start with this. I've come to your house, you've cooked for me.

• 7:50Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  I was well brought up and so I was told never go to a house. I didn't bring chocolates. I brought you both that there, which is a little.

• 7:59Jessie Ware?

  Oh my God, I love you. Give us face masks.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Little steamy face masks.

• 8:03Jessie Ware?

  What are you trying to say?

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Nothing. I've not, I just thought ladies love a little face trick.

• 8:08Jessie Ware?

  That is amazing.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  I wished I'd had this earlier, actually.

• 8:11Jessie Ware?

  Thank you.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  It's a pleasure.

• 8:12Jessie Ware?

  Have you put one on this morning?

• 8:14Speaker 04

  No, I've not. I've done it this morning.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  Self-forming sleep.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  I feel very well.

• 8:19Jessie Ware?

  Glow getter.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not great for a podcast, obviously. It's a, there's a thing.

• 8:24Jessie Ware?

  I love that.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  I didn't want to bring chocolates or flowers and.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  So you have to lie down for thirty minutes with this on your face? And will I look twenty years younger when I finish?

• 8:33Jessie Ware?

  You'll look like Parker Posey.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  You'll look nine years old. Exactly right. Anyway, sorry, I interrupted.

• 8:38Jessie Ware?

  No, I interrupted. I'm really, well, we're all Jews, so we interrupt. Is that just a thing?

• 8:42Speaker 04

  Do you know what? I heard a brilliant podcast a few months ago about linguistics and people from the East Coast, and I guess all Jews, interrupt each other. That's what conversation is. You talk until someone else takes the baton. People from the West Coast or Midwest don't. And so when they tested people's, I don't know, heart rate or whatever, when they, we got people from the Midwest to speak from the East Coast, they thought they were incredibly rude.

• 9:01Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  They interrupted. Whereas people from the, uh, East Coast thought that people were basically brain damaged.

• 9:08Jessie Ware?

  Slow, yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  For not speaking or were uninterested.

• 9:10Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  It's just a different kind of cultural habit.

• 9:12Jessie Ware?

  I'm just gonna go with that for all you haters on the comments that say Lenny and I interrupt. It's a, it's a linguistics actual thing.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  I think Jewish people do interrupt a little bit more than other ethnic groups.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  My wife is not Jewish and she, uh, grew up in Canada and she often thinks that I'm being incredibly aggressive when I'm just being passionate and Jewish.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  About the salt or whatever the hell it is.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  No, but that, sometimes her daughter thinks we're arguing and we're just talking loudly, loudly asserting ourselves.

• 9:40Jessie Ware?

  Back to this email.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 9:42Jessie Ware?

  You were in Australia, were you? Down under or on your knees? You had marigolds on. I don't know why you were cleaning your friends.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  This is not gonna go well. So my, I stayed at my friend's place in Los Angeles.

• 9:53Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, okay.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  And, uh, uh, it, it needed a bit of a deep clean when I got there.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  You're kidding.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  I, so he's a very lovely man and he's, uh, very talented in many ways, but cleaning is not one of his talents. So I got there and I thought, I can't stay here. And so I went out and I bought marigolds and, and got on my knees and I was scrubbing and I thought, the glamour. In between podcasts and talk shows, here I am. But then I realised I was coming on your podcast and it's all about food. And that not only did I go vegan a few years ago to punish myself because life was going too well, but I actually hate most vegetables and you wouldn't know what's cooked for me. Uh, so I sent you a list of all the things I don't eat, which basically left Chris. Essentially, didn't it?

• 10:28Jessie Ware?

  That was quite helpful and I appreciated that and you did kind of select out, gave you three options and you selected something. So I feel like.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  It was a dealer's choice. I said, they all look good to me.

• 10:38Jessie Ware?

  Okay, that's really sweet. So can we ask why you went vegan? Because you seem quite resentful about the fact that you went vegan.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  If anyone's listening, don't do it. It's a nightmare. It ruins your life.

• 10:48Jessie Ware?

  Vegan?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Because it was the middle of lockdown and my daughter, one of whom is sitting in the room here, my lovely daughter Ruby, but she was, I guess, fifteen and her sister was eighteen, who should have been spending her first year at university, instead of spending her first year locked at home with her parents. And of course, remember, we didn't know how this was going to end, if it was going to end, if the world was going to fall apart and gangs were going to kick the door down on us. So it was pretty depressing. Just spent New Year's Eve, which is not something you want to do with your parents. And it was New Year's Day and I said to her elder sister, who was isolating a bit too much, I felt, come on, let's do something fun together. Let's sign up for martial arts or, you know, let's learn a language or something. She went, oh, just leave it, Dad. And I said, come on, let's do something together. It's January the first. She went, I'm doing something. I said, what? Oh, hello, a ghost just entered the room there. I didn't hear that.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And she said, I'm doing veganuary. And I said, I'll do it. She went, I said, veganuary, Dad. Vegan for January. I went, I know. She goes, that's no meat, no cheese. That's all I've ever seen you eat your whole life. And I said, well, I won't. She went, it's not going to happen. And that's all it took. She did it for 10 days. I'm still doing it five years later. I still hate it.

• 11:51Jessie Ware?

  Why do you do it? You're that stubborn that you just need to.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Stubborn. Jessie knows me, yeah. It's also probably better for you.

• 11:58Jessie Ware?

  You must have felt better after a month, but otherwise you would have not kept it going.

• 12:02Speaker 04

  Felt pretty good before. I miss meat every day. I eat all that horrible fake meat, which is probably worse for you.

• 12:07Jessie Ware?

  It is. It's all processed. But Jason, the whole thing is that it's veganuary. You can stop after January.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Where were you for the last four and a half years? I didn't realise. No, I know. It is pretty good. I also led a very, very unhealthy lifestyle. And I fly all the time. I'm doing everything I can to ruin the planet in every other way. So I know the vegan. I can one tiny bit of virtue.

• 12:27Jessie Ware?

  So you're always on a plane. So which airline does the best vegan food?

• 12:31Speaker 04

  No, and I don't eat on the plane. I buy the food at the airport and I need to, or I go to the lounge if I'm lucky enough to be flying business.

• 12:36Jessie Ware?

  What do you buy?

• 12:38Speaker 04

  I go to Pret or something and I buy or Leon. You know what I used to love doing was a terrible confession. I used to when, back in the olden days when I started acting, when it was all black and white, uh. They would fly you first class places and uh now they fly you business and uh but in first class, I would always eat McDonald's from the airport. I'd buy it, I'd sit in first class, it stinks.

• 12:57Jessie Ware?

  You're that person.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  And it would make people complain and ask if I had a first class ticket and they would always check my tickets as well. And they'd be upset to find out. Anyway, I don't do that anymore. It's karma.

• 13:07Jessie Ware?

  You're naughty.

• 13:08Speaker 04

  I like to.

• 13:09Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, you like being naughty.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  I've got two children, funnily enough. One, as I say, sitting in the kitchen here.

• 13:14Jessie Ware?

  Oh my god, Ruby, get on the mic now.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Ruby, blowing my cover completely.

• 13:18Jessie Ware?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Come here, come on, say what you just said. This is Ruby.

• 13:21Jessie Ware?

  Ruby, please come on the mic.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  He's not vegan for dessert, is he?

• 13:24Jessie Ware?

  You'd let that out of your bloody email.

• 13:26Speaker 04

  I'll tell you why. So a very good friend of mine's name is Gideon Raff. He's a guy that created Homeland and Tyrant and Spy, whatever. He's a wonderful writer and director. And he's a militant vegan and the sign off on his email is someday we will come to look upon the slaughter of animals as we now look upon the slaughter of men.

• 13:40Jessie Ware?

  And he puts that on the bottom.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Da Vinci. It's a Da Vinci quote. So the bottom of all of his emails. And he was freakishly militant about it on set when we were shooting and it had like Meatless Monday. And if anybody broke it, they were going to be sacked, he said and all this stuff. So when I joined this mad, horrible, masochistic cult, I wrote him a thing. Oh no, I spoke to him, I think on uh on FaceTime and I went, I've joined this mad cult. I hate it. I don't know how you live with it. I don't, dessert's a nightmare. He goes. Oh, don't do dessert. We can't do ice cream. I went, I've known you for years. He went, yeah, yeah, we can't do ice cream. And that little crack, I have expanded to a huge open door now for all desserts.

• 14:13Jessie Ware?

  So you prefer dessert to everything else, I should imagine.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  I live for dessert, Lenny. That's all I live for.

• 14:18Jessie Ware?

  Well, I have done dessert, but I've done a fucking vegan dessert mate, but I am doing.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  No, it's better, it's better for you.

• 14:24Jessie Ware?

  No, look, I've got, maybe it will satisfy enough. Um vegan cookies that we're gonna do cookie sandwiches with a scoop of ice cream, but it was vegan ice cream. But I think maybe I've got some Haagen Dazs in there if you need to have that.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  I like it when sometimes I'm given something and I I don't ask and I assume it's vegan, knowing some part that it isn't vegan, but what the hell.

• 14:44Jessie Ware?

  I, you know what, like, I don't know how.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  But did you ever see?

• 14:47Jessie Ware?

  Going to go down with the vegan world that you are so disparaging about.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  I'm not. Look, the truth is it's better for the planet, it's better for you. Did you ever see Game Changers, that fantastic documentary on Netflix?

• 14:57Jessie Ware?

  Yes.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  So I did, years ago I was in, um, twenty seventeen or something, I was in Star Trek. And I lived in Toronto and had this lovely house and so I had all the cast and crew over every weekend, I did a huge barbecue. And week by week, there was always more meat left, I can never understand it. And they were all watching this documentary, What the Health, on Netflix, which turned them all vegetarian, but they didn't want to tell me, they thought I'd be upset. And it said more and more animals were getting slaughtered for no reason. And, but What the Health is a rubbish documentary because it makes all these claims which aren't true. And you can just Google it and it tells you all these things that they said aren't true. James Cameron made a documentary about plant-based eating, he doesn't like to call it vegan, he and his wife is their big campaign. And it's fantastic, it's all game changers and you cannot challenge any of the science in it. And in it, instead of saying, this is good for you, this is bad for the planet, all these poor animals suffer, they just go.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Do you want to meet the strongest person in the world? He's a vegan. Do you want to meet the smartest person in the world? He's a vegan. Do you want to meet the fastest people in the world? They're vegans. And they tell you why, and they have those martial arts artists who is looking to recover from injury. But the bit that every, all the men remember is they take all these football players, college football players, and they go, how good are your erections? And they go, what? And they go, we can measure them, measure your nighttime erections. And they give them vegan meal for three days, they go, I need red meat. And it turns out they've got much bigger, longer lasting, stronger, as in you can hang weights on them erections. When they're vegan, whether they stay vegan, I don't know, but that's the bit I remember.

• 16:15Jessie Ware?

  Dude, I'm not talking about the prosthetic, that was literally the most perfect segue into that, but I'm not gonna do it. Not today, not today.

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Bounce right off that piece of rubber.

• 16:24Jessie Ware?

  But, um, that is, no, enough, thank you, thank you, Mum. Um, so, um, let's take it back to childhood.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Liverpool.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  I grew up in Manchester.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Did you really?

• 16:36Jessie Ware?

  You both don't have accents.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  No, well, why have you lost yours? I know I have lost mine.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Because my parents weren't from Manchester.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Oh, where are they from?

• 16:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, Northern Ireland and Birmingham.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Wow, you don't, you don't, can you do those, can you do them, do the accents?

• 16:49Speaker 03

  It's very modern.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Oh, that's great.

• 16:51Jessie Ware?

  The only one, it's great.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the only one I can do, and Birmingham was nice fish and chips.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Oh, you can do it, Lenny, you've got the skills. Accents are musical, can you do them as well?

• 17:01Jessie Ware?

  I.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  No, she's South London.

• 17:03Jessie Ware?

  No, I, I think I'm okay.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  No, if you can sing, you can do accents.

• 17:06Jessie Ware?

  I can, I can do a good.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Not if you can sing, you can sing.

• 17:08Jessie Ware?

  I can do Miss Adelaide, yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  You can do Miss Adelaide, yeah.

• 17:10Jessie Ware?

  A poison can develop a cold. Yeah, that's not as much as I can do.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  So I was offered that, I was offered Guys and Dolls.

• 17:16Jessie Ware?

  What, Miss Adelaide?

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I don't see why you, I'd be put in a box.

• 17:18Jessie Ware?

  What, no, he's Sky.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  I was offered Sky or Nathan at one point.

• 17:22Jessie Ware?

  Or Nathan, oh.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  To a recast, I went to the, and I said, no, I can't possibly, I'm not a good enough singer, I love singers, I love your voice.

• 17:27Jessie Ware?

  When was this?

• 17:28Speaker 04

  This is years ago, obviously, not that many years ago, but I, I, uh, I, I said, I, I got the producer's phone on, phone on, I was going, were you fucking mad? Is this like the producer, you've got too much investment, are you trying to shut the show down? He said, no, no, I'm sure we can transpose it down and up, and I went, I can't sing well enough, he said, people always say that, I go, no, no. I love voices, I love musicals.

• 17:46Jessie Ware?

  I bet you can sing.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  I had the gayest straight man you've ever met in your life, all my playlist of show tunes, I, I, so, anyway, I said, no, thanks very much, you should do your research. And then my wife's grandma was coming to stay for Christmas, as she always used to do, and my wife goes, can you get us tickets for Guys and Dolls? And I went, I just turned it down, she goes, well, phone up and see if you can get house seats, and I went, that's a bit awkward. She goes, do it, so I phoned up and I went, listen, I'm definitely not doing the show, but just so I can make a hundred and ten percent sure, can I have some freebie seats for Saturday night?

• 18:12Jessie Ware?

  Oh, clever.

• 18:13Speaker 04

  And they said, yeah, so I went with my, uh, wife and my mother-in-law, and my grandmother-in-law, it was in a wheelchair, they, they made a special entrance for us, we'd get there, and they put a side room aside with champagne. On, on, on oysters on ice, and the producer came in with this score and the cast, and I went, no, no, no, honestly, I swear to God, you wouldn't want me in this show. He goes, I know, just be open-minded, because Nathan, she just talks the same, she was written for a stand-up.

• 18:33Jessie Ware?

  Sue me, sue me, yeah, you could have done it.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  There's no she sings, no, Nathan just goes, Adelaide, Adelaide, it's not really a song, but Sky's the good part. So anyway, we watched the show, it's clear within two bars, it's way out of my, I couldn't possibly do it, but they give us the cast CD, which I keep in the car. And it stays there for weeks, and I'm singing the stuff to myself, and my kids are singing along with me and stuff. And one day my mistress goes, you're not thinking of doing the show, are you? And I said, no, no, she goes, but definitely, I said, yeah, she goes, are you sure, and I go, yeah, she goes, then stop singing those fucking songs, you're driving us all mad. And I went, is it that bad? She goes, yeah, terrible.

• 19:06Jessie Ware?

  I, um, I mean, we can keep on talking about theatre and everything, but we need to talk about growing up, where you grew up, and we, we were talking about accents.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  Liverpool.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Go on, you get it back on track, girl.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Sorry, I've got to.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  Go on then.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Um, Liverpool, who was around the dinner table and what were you eating?

• 19:21Speaker 04

  Uh, was just the kind of Jewish food that gave my father two quadruple heart bypasses, ten stents and three oblations. Uh, deep fried and then fill in the blank, it doesn't really matter.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Chopped and fried fish.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, grilled fish. Well, so I've got a brother who's allergic to fish.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  So, uh, one day a week, he would be, I don't know what, he was farmed out somewhere or someone else's house somewhere. And the whole house would stink of fish.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Fish.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  grilled fish fried everywhere.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Big problem about cooking grilled fish.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  It stinks.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  You have to wear a shower cap and no clothes.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you, everything smells of it.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  God, my mother didn't do that because I need therapy even more than I do already.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  How was her chicken soup and matzo balls?

• 19:58Speaker 04

  It was fantastic, but all those things were fantastic. The reason they're fantastic is they were so rich with taste and spices and flavour. And that nothing ever tasted like that. Nothing I've ever ordered in public ever tasted like that, except the stuff that I have made myself. Um, but it was, I mean, we loved griviness, which is a deep fried skin, but we loved anything that was so thick with grease that when you hit it with a fork. The grease would spray all over the room. We loved potatoes that were, you know, thick with oil. She never learnt to, to cook. No one, no one showed her. Her own mother was a horrendously abusive person who, who didn't cook and also, uh, dismissed her all the time. So she, she taught herself and there weren't cookbooks. I can't, what am I saying? Of course there were cookbooks, but whatever. She was cooking for four boys and her husband, who all ate like pigs.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Wanted two or three portions. She had to cook these industrial quantities of food. And I think to my shame that I'm not sure I ever thanked her. I was fussy. My brothers were all fussy about different things. I didn't like it if I could see the tomatoes in bolognese or whatever, for instance, but. But it was, she made all those things that are peasant food, you know, she got from her grandparents, holland stuff, which is cow's foot jelly, which. Seemed then to me as disgusting as it seems to me now saying it, but whatever, it just felt, it was the fabric of our, our life. But I had this amazing experience, I don't know, thirty years later, we were doing Harry Potter publicity. And we were sent all over the world and I could never do it. And then the last year, I, they said, you know, do you want to do it this year? And I said, actually, I'm free. I was always working. They said, you can go to Copenhagen. I'm like, bloody hell, the people went to South America. But I went to Copenhagen and my wife came and they sent us some very fancy restaurant one night.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  No, we couldn't get into that one. There was another one called Shay Paul, I think.

• 21:27Jessie Ware?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  So he comes up, he goes, hello mate, I'm Paul from Essex, amazingly. And he said, tell me about your childhood. Tell me everything you ate, tell me the songs you remember, tell me the smells you remember. And I said, well, I grew up in Liverpool. And I told him the stories and then Emma told the stories about growing up in Canada. And each course was some oak cuisine, some Michelin star version of what we ate. But it would have a song to go with it and it would have a smell to go with it. And he'd come and say, close your eyes, it's Friday night, your mother's cooking fish. You know, Nancy Sinatra's playing on the eight track.

• 21:55Jessie Ware?

  Oh, my god.

• 21:56Speaker 04

  And then each dish was some, the greatest possible version of what, although it wasn't as tasty as my mum's.

• 22:02Jessie Ware?

  Aww.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  It was, do you guys watch Hot Ones ever?

• 22:05Jessie Ware?

  I've watched it. Have you been on it?

• 22:07Speaker 04

  No, I wanted to go on it this year with the kids, I played my kids in White Lotus, but they had Lisa on.

• 22:11Jessie Ware?

  You like, you like spicy food. Mum, do you know about Hot Ones?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 22:16Jessie Ware?

  It's this guy Shaun.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Evans, I think, I can't remember.

• 22:19Jessie Ware?

  And he eats different wings.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  And they get hotter and hotter.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  I would die. I can't even have the light one at Nando's.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  But so the, the most amusing version of, this one's season seventeen or something, it's phenomenally successful on a YouTube show. But the best one ever was Gordon Ramsay, because Gordon Ramsay couldn't take anything, because he's a proper chef. So he's got a very subtle palate. So spicy, he was crying, he was snorting orange juice and eating donuts and the rest of it. So, uh, I, I'm just too accustomed to my mum's strong taste. So he made us this beautiful meal. But the taste was too subtle for me. I burnt my taste buds out. I need stuff to taste.

• 22:54Jessie Ware?

  Speaking of food, I'm just gonna put my lama, I don't know if they're, what, what, we're, we're discussing whether we think they're called lama shuns or lama. Lama shun. Lama shuns, Turkish pizzas.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 23:06Jessie Ware?

  But anyway, I'm just gonna deal with that whilst mum asks you more questions.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  So you know White Lotus, sometimes they, they often bring people back in from previous, previous series. Are you gonna be back in it?

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Well, obviously I would do Mike White's shopping list, you know, if he asked me to, but if I was, people who saw it, I can't imagine that character. I can't imagine how he would squeeze him back in.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  You could, you might be a born again good person.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, he is a good, who says he's that person?

• 23:30Speaker 03

  You've just come out of prison, yeah, and then you're.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Why is he gonna go for a holiday? Where's he gonna get the money from?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  You become a priest or a rabbi or something in prison and then you're going to do it in something else.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  I think, Mike, you're short of ideas. You should send that off as a suggestion on a postcard.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, like Jonathan Aitken.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  You know who I'd bring back?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Who?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Christian, who played the hotel manager Fabian. He didn't do enough stuff. He's a genius. He'd disappear all the time, go back to Germany. He didn't have a giant part and I'd say, "Where are you going?" "I'm just going back to Germany." And one point, I said, "What did you do back there?" He goes, "I'm doing some work." And I went, "What?" He's been playing Hamlet, Macbeth and Dorian Gray in rep for German National Theatre for 11 years, in productions built around him and his band, because his band have had six hit albums out. He's a Renaissance man.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  It's quite a small part in White Lotus.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  It was, but I would like to see his part expanded because he's a genius. He's an acting genius.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  So who was your best friend on the set?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Well, Emma, my wife was there.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Oh, she was there.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  She doesn't normally come to any of them.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  So you didn't have to chum up with anyone?

• 24:24Speaker 04

  I did chum up. You know who I chummed up with because she didn't arrive for the first month is my kids. Patrick Salmon and Sarah Catherine became like my kids, you know, by proxy and I fell madly in love with them. I still, we text each other all the time. They're gorgeous, yeah. They're gorgeous people. I didn't expect Patrick to be nice because he's son of a famous movie star and I, he's such a fabulous grounded person and all three of them. I mean, I became friends with Christian and John Greis who played Greg slash Gary, spoiler.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Not Walton Goggin?

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Walton and Amy Heather. So you don't really, you shoot when other people are off and you're off when other people are shooting. So everyone's storyline, you don't get to mix with the other storylines very much unless you do.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Oh, how odd.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  So, you know, I've been friends with everybody.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, we see it all as one story, yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  Sometimes we were all on the beach together or something, but mostly, no, you shoot when other people are off and you're with your kind of story group.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  Was that hotel as gorgeous as it looked?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Well, it's not one hotel. Yes, Jesse's on it.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  It was like 10 different hotels. So people, mostly the exterior is the Four Seasons in Korsomu. And a lot of people are going there now. They're massively booked out, particularly our villa.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  They're only used to Four Seasons because I've been to the one in Hawaii that they used for it, Maui.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Well, that was during lockdown.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  I didn't stay there, but I went there.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  So that was all done in one, but now they move around different ones. So people who go there and go, "Wait a second, Spal looks different, the restaurant is different," they're going to be very disappointed. But it is still gorgeous. All of the hotels are gorgeous.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Had you been to Thailand before?

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Nah, but I've done it now.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  How did the food, tell me?

• 25:51Speaker 04

  Do you know what all my mates said to me? Oh, you'd be in heaven there, vegan heaven. No, it was bollocks, was it? No, no. We're in these fancy hotels, so they make all these super fancy buffets and I go, because I'm vegan, they put potatoes out. Or they put onions out and I go, I could do with a meal, you know. Anyway, I ended up having tofu curry pretty much every day for seven months.

• 26:07Jessie Ware?

  Green tofu curry.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Green or red.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  What about the noodles? Do they have noodles in Thailand?

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Pad Thai?

• 26:14Speaker 04

  They could make you a vegan pad Thai, sure I had that. And, you know, when you've had it six hundred times, it's a bit boring.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  And you're not really on holiday really, are you?

• 26:21Speaker 04

  We weren't on holiday. That's so. I got in a lot of trouble because people go, what was it like? And a lot of the other actors, they're very good kind of brand managers. They go, it was wonderful in Thailand, fabulous.

• 26:29Jessie Ware?

  No, you said the most, yeah, but you said the most iconic line that has like travelled everywhere now.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Oh, it was a bit like Lord of the Flies.

• 26:35Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, summer camp and theatre campers, Lord of the Flies or summer campers, Lord of the Flies?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it's a, like, there's a lot of people away from home for a long period of time, away from their families, and it was everything. It was all the things you would expect in a group of people. Anyway, all these online Sherlock Holmes has read a whole bunch of bollocks into it and started extrapolating from what they thought they could see in people's photographs about where the fault lines were in our, in our friendships. This is all complete bollocks. They've no idea.

• 26:58Jessie Ware?

  You're here to talk about a different film. Oh, well, that was a.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Oh, yes, I am, that's right.

• 27:01Jessie Ware?

  Talk about.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  You're so professional, Jessie. It's very impressive. Very good.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  But we, I'd read the book.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Have you?

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  She should have Ray on, she's fantastic. So the book, sorry, the film's called The Salt Park.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Uh, and it's a memoir. It's not, it's not a fictional book. It's a memoir of this extraordinary time in, uh, the life of Raina Wynn and her husband Moth. Um, and it beggars belief. You wouldn't write this fiction. It's so extraordinary. It, it.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Have you met Raina?

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I spent time with both of them.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Jillian?

• 27:29Speaker 04

  She looks enough like Jillian, yeah. I wish I looked like Moth. He's so gorgeous. He just radiates bonhomie as well. He's so handsome and striking.

• 27:37Jessie Ware?

  You were so incredible in it. It was like, are we just, I'd just gone from watching you play this like corrupt, you know, guy, Texan who's about to go to prison, and then you're this salt of the earth, warm, it was so beautiful to watch you.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  That's so lovely of you to say, but I honestly feel like I'm one percent of how gorgeous Moth is in person. He's like, it's like meeting a slim father Christmas. You cannot help but fall in love with this man. He's the most extraordinary person. And.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Did you meet him before you started doing the cast?

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Oh, God, yeah. One of the great things about my job is that. Sometimes this stuff doesn't end up on screen, but you get to walk in people's shoes. You get to shadow them, you get to hang out with them, you get to ask them really inappropriate questions that no journalist would ever ask. People tell me things they've never told their family. And so Moth particularly, well, let me tell the story to the people listening, just in case, without spoiling it. Moth and Ray were farmers, actually from Staffordshire, and they're in Wales. And they had a little Airbnb, but they have two kids who are off at university and they. His friend, his childhood friend, offered them an investment opportunity to uh to give their kids a better future. So they did it because they trusted him and it was a con. And they ended up, this terrible court case went on for years and they were completely in the right, but they they had, they couldn't get legal aid. They were trying to do it themselves and it's really out of their wheelhouse.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  And and finally, it came to this big court case where they they had a piece of paper that was gonna. Uh, all the other people who had been conned in the same way, they're gonna hand this letter over and the court was gonna go, oh, I see, it's a con. You're fine, but they didn't give it in time. So they got to court and they were told, I mean, really blind side of them. You've got to get out of your house in a week and you've got to give up all your money and you're you're broke and homeless. And they just were in shock and they went home and in that week when they went to pack up their house. They had a doctor's appointment, he he's, he thought it was the stress of the court case coming up. And also he'd fallen through the roof of the barn about a year before, so his leg had stopped working, his arm was stopped working. Memory had started going and he was kind of, hmm, his bodily functions were failing. And they went to the doctor, they thought they'd be told it's arthritis.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  The doctor sat him down and said, it's a, it's called CBD, it's cortical basal degeneration, it's a terminal neurological condition. And you have possibly weeks or months to live. You need to go home, avoid the stairs and say your goodbyes. Well, they went home, but it wasn't going to be their home much longer and they just kind of froze. They didn't know what to do and before they knew it, the bailiffs were banging on the door. They were hiding under the stairs, he's a, you know, grown men and women, uh, man and woman and uh. And they just didn't know what to do and and this is where the film starts. They just were quivering on the stairs and they were, they were holding a box of books. He has a brain like Wikipedia. He loves books, self-educated, thousands and thousands of books in his library. But he didn't, he he had one book in his hand, Beowulf in his hand, and he had this box.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  And sticking out the top of the box was a book of the tour of the southeast coast of uh Britain. Like, you know, a guided tour of walking it. And Ray said, let's just walk. Which is a bit bizarre thing to say to a man who's got one leg.

• 30:23Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  He's got one leg and one arm.

• 30:25Jessie Ware?

  And it's quite hard to watch you as Moth walking because it looks such a struggle. He drags his left foot like, um, is it his left or right foot?

• 30:33Speaker 04

  His left foot.

• 30:34Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, and he drags it and it's kind of, you think.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  He couldn't hold the rucksack, he couldn't sell it. It took half an hour for her to move his legs and arms every morning to get him out of bed to be able to stand up. But they had nothing and no friends would put them up. They spent their last three hundred quid on two rucksacks, stupidly really thin sleeping bags in a tent. And they took off and they froze and they starved and they were rejected by people and they were welcomed by people. They encountered acts of extraordinary kindness and extraordinary cruelty. And one of the miraculous things that happened, apart from them discovering each other, their stuff wasn't who they were. Is his condition started to, I'm gonna cry now, sorry.

• 31:09Jessie Ware?

  Don't.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  His condition started to reverse. No doctors understand it to this day, they've scanned him many times, he's done many walks since. But they, but they, uh, it's not too much of a spoiler because it's not the secret of what happened in the film. It's watching this love story unfold, this mystery. And when they got to somewhere, when it was after six months, they couldn't, uh, survive anymore and someone gave them their barn. Uh, uh, she started, because he started to forget again, he forgot all the things that happened on this walk that just happened. She wrote down as a fiftieth birthday gift him a memoir, uh, this five hundred page memoir of him, three hundred page memoir. And their daughter, who saw it, went, it's really good mum, you should try and publish it, don't be ridiculous, I'm a farmer. Well, I am gonna cry, I'm pathetic. Anyway, it sold millions of copies, it's now on a fourth book. They've had to do many, many walks, Moth is still alive.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  He's not particularly well, but he's alive and he's extraordinary. And, uh, and the film is such a love story to them, to nature, to the mystery of the human body. And to the kindnesses they encountered on route.

• 32:05Jessie Ware?

  The one, what do you?

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Don't just spoil it for everyone, no one will go and see the film now.

• 32:09Jessie Ware?

  No, but what do you think the motivation was to do this coastal walk?

• 32:13Speaker 04

  She's mental, rave, you're listening, what's the matter with you?

• 32:17Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, but what, that was the only thing that I couldn't work out, to be honest.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  You know, one of the great things that I like about the book and, and you know, it's up to people that like about the film is that, I mean, I've been in lots of films, obviously in TV shows and they're constructive. You construct. Screenplays and people contribute, they develop, people give them money, they they suggest a traditional narrative structure. This is what happened to them. And a lot of the things they encounter, I remember seeing one review going, why would they stick in that bit about the guy who's been mistaken for a famous poet?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  I know.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Because that's what happened. And sometimes it's nice to go and see a story that actually happened because we're so used to well structured stories, we know where they're going and this is what happened to these people. Why did she do it? I don't know. I mean, they wanted some time to clear their heads.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  I thought I'd missed it.

• 33:00Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Why she'd done it, because I thought.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  They couldn't get a council house.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Because he wouldn't say, I know I'm going to be dead within a year, which is what they'd been told.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Because he didn't feel, he felt guilty saying that. They didn't have friends, they felt they didn't want to impose on their friends and they were ashamed as well, they were embarrassed, they felt, they felt disgrace.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Their sister.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  They stayed briefly with his brother, but essentially they were on their own.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Have they got a house now?

• 33:23Speaker 04

  They, she sold four books very well, but the irony being, no, she's just made a fortune, but the irony being, you know, once they live somewhere, his body starts to pack up and his mind starts to pack up again. That, you know, so, so talking about Moth, how lovely he is, when I met him first on Zoom and then in person and on Zoom a few times. You know, I'm asking him these difficult questions about his body packing up, his bodily functions packing up, his mind packing up, he's a super bright man. And the first time I watched the Zoom back to try and nail down his accent, because it's complicated, it's kind of half Staffordshire. I think he had a dad from Burnley and stuff, so it's a mixture of accents. I realised we were laughing all the time, laughing and laughing, and I felt in a good mood, it's like when you listen to, you know, one of those laughing, little machines that laugh, people put, you know, you just, you can't stop laughing. And then I realised we're laughing while he's telling me about the most terrible things

• 34:08Speaker 04

  that a human being can go through, what it's like to not remember the beginning of a sentence, what it's like to, for things to blank out, what it's like to need help going to the toilet or what it's like. And he wanted me to feel comfortable, he wants anyone he's talking to to feel comfortable. So I go, you'll laugh at this, Jason, it's so funny. When I go to try and brush my teeth, it's not funny. But he's such a lovely man, he doesn't want to impose the pain of what he goes through on his wife or his kids or on a stranger.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Where does the name Moth come from?

• 34:35Speaker 04

  Aha. Should I tell you, I want to fill mine. It's short for something, a very common name. Come on, you can do it.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Timothy.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Fuck me. No one ever gets it.

• 34:46Jessie Ware?

  She's good.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Lenny, class act.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  But it's the only one I could think of.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  No, no, you're right.

• 34:51Jessie Ware?

  She does Wordle every day and it's wack.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  So I do Wordle, Quadle and Octordle with various people around the world.

• 34:57Jessie Ware?

  What's Quadle and Octordle?

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Quadle's four, Octordle is eight. I do, Jeff Pope, who wrote Archie, the Cary Grant thing. Yeah, I do Wordle, Quadle and Octordle every day.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  I also remember you looking very dashing. I think I first fell in love with you when you were in Death of Stalin.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Oh, that, you found that?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  You were very handsome in that, very dashing. You wore a nice uniform.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  He's a monster.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  But you look so good.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  You've got issues.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  No, you look so gorgeous.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Well, you like a man in uniform, obviously.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  No, I didn't think I did.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Just so I can let you know why I'm not.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  I like a Jew in uniform.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  Can I tell you why I'm not flattered by that? Because I had my chest and arms and shoulders padded in that uniform. To look like Zuko. And I'm so much more like Charles Hawtree than I am like Brian Glover, who I not modeled it on.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Who directed that?

• 35:42Speaker 04

  Amane Yanucci.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  That's why I went, yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  It's fantastic.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  But also my daughter acts and she'd been in a film with Rupert Friend.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  Oh, Rube, who's so funny in that. I didn't, I'd not seen it in a comedy.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  He was very funny in that.

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Genius. He practised spitting in the, so he's, the character tries to spit at somebody's back and it lands in his face. He practised and practised and practised. He lay there on his, on his back in the trailer, spitting in the air, making it land on his face. Over and over again. Talking of which, look at this delicious food.

• 36:10Jessie Ware?

  Um, okay, very good. Um, would you like to do a podcast when you're?

• 36:14Speaker 04

  No, I've been asked and I feel the public shouldn't know who I am. They won't believe me in character.

• 36:18Jessie Ware?

  But what I do like about you is that you are an open book, which I do think is quite refreshing.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  Well, this is the public version of me. I'm, I'm much more of a dick in private. Anyway, here we are.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Is he a dick?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Don't ask my daughter.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, but she would be very honest and say, oh god, yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  So Rube, honestly, you've heard me do a million interviews and stuff like that. Do you think that it's really me that the public hear? Come on, come on.

• 36:41Jessie Ware?

  Well, now I'm offended that we're not getting the real Jason Isbell.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  I think I, I think I'm less. I'm much bitchier. I've been asked to do a memoir, for instance, and all of the stories I've got.

• 36:50Jessie Ware?

  I think you're being quite a bitch today. Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  But I'm not naming names. I'm not naming names. Sorry, Rupert.

• 36:55Speaker 05

  I do think, in private, you are a bit of a gossip. Oh, no.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  It's true. It's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't mime at me, Lenny. I am too, she's saying.

• 37:05Jessie Ware?

  Yeah. Okay, so listen, we have lame jeans.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  People listening, it looks amazing.

• 37:10Jessie Ware?

  That's very sweet. I've tried to make homemade flatbreads, which I've never done. That's an M and S one, so you can take your pick. I won't be offended.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  I'm not touching the M and S one.

• 37:16Jessie Ware?

  Okay, fine. But that's a mushroom, pepper. It's quite spicy, Mum, I'm sorry.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Awesome.

• 37:21Jessie Ware?

  Then we've got some homemade hummus with some crispy shallots, babaganous.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  Fantastic.

• 37:25Jessie Ware?

  And then a kind of onion, tomatoey sumac, nigelises.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  So this reminds me of a fabulous showbiz story, I can tell you.

• 37:34Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, great. Love it.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  So I did this film Black Hawk Down, and for which we all went training with the Rangers in Fort Benning in Georgia. It was a real honour that the survivors of that battle came and the family members of the dead, and we felt a keen responsibility to try and not be show busy and tell their story honestly. And they gave us all a Ranger coin, and this note was passed under the door supposedly from their dead colleagues, and it said, "Please tell our story true." I don't even remember the bad grammar of it. It was very moving. So anyway, we arrive in Morocco, and I've been, it's like a week-long improvisation. I've essentially been like their commander for the week. All the boys played along with it, you know. So we get there, we're on a big coach going from the airport. We pass a McDonald's, and the American's like, "Ah, it's going to get McDonald's." And I go, "Oh, come on, kids. We're in Morocco.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Let's have Moroccan food." So we arranged this meal that night, where we all go to a proper old Moroccan Riyadh, and the guy with the Tommy Cooper hat and a lantern leads us down the alleyways and stuff. We go into Riyadh, and they bring all this metso, and lovely Josh Hartnett, who's a very sweet man, very sweet boy then of 21, he goes, "Hey, Jason, can you order me some, like, something vegetarian? I'm vegetarian." I said, "Well, Josh, those are carrots, mate. Those are onions. That's eggplant, aubergine, you know." He goes, "I know, but it might have touched meat, or so could you ask?" So, you know, so I... They all speak Arabic or French there in Morocco, so I speak my schoolboy French, and I said, "Can we have something..." He's vegetarian. And the guy says to me in French, "Well, that's a carrot and that's an onion." And I go, "I know, I told him, but he said, 'Just something that doesn't touch meat.'" So okay, so it brings out some other, like a purple puree thing, but it's

• 39:00Speaker 04

  aubergine, some kind of, because they do everything with eggplant, right? So it's this purple thing, and Josh eats it, goes, "Hamid, this is delicious, man. What's it called?" And I said to the guy, "What's it called?" And he goes, "Bakhara, Bakhabadakara," some Arabic name. And I said, "I don't understand that, sorry. What is it in French?" And he goes, "Nagah Badalad." And I go, "I'm so sorry." And Josh goes, "I'd really like to order this thing again, man, because it's fantastic." So I said, "Right, maybe someone else can write it down." The chef comes out, also thrives me in Arabic and French. I said, "I don't understand." He said, "It's not meat." Josh has like two bowls in there. He goes, "It's not meat, it's brine." I go, "It's in brine, is it? Saltwater?" He goes, "No, brine, brine from red." Oi, oi. Poor old Josh chokes on his food. I said, "I said not meat." He goes, "It's from red, make you very clever."

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Josh starts crying, God bless him. Oh my God! "How many eat meat since I was seven years old?" Oh God! That was that, but it looks like this is my point. It looks like what we're eating now.

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• 41:34Speaker 04

  Oh God, that's fantastic. I love a mushroom. Right level spiciness with onions. I love the whole onion. Best thing about being married is that you could have every member of the onion family your whole life. Onions, garlic, leeks.

• 41:47Jessie Ware?

  Oh yeah, and then have a...

• 41:48Speaker 04

  And not worry about it.

• 41:49Jessie Ware?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  She's not going... She can't cite that in court. It's not enough, is it?

• 41:53Jessie Ware?

  So your wife is Canadian, did you say?

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Born in London.

• 41:57Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  And then moved to Canada for most of her childhood. And then did a runner, came back when she was 18.

• 42:04Jessie Ware?

  And what food did you have at your wedding?

• 42:07Speaker 04

  Well, our wedding is a bit of a... Ruby's going to put a face on it. They're just supposed to have a wedding. We were in Los Angeles, she was pregnant, Emma. She'd been sick for... She had lung problems. And we wanted to fly home. And I phoned my brother, who's a doctor, and he put us on to a lung specialist. And the guy said, "You need to go to a hospital and have a check for pulmonary embolism right now." Because you shouldn't get on a plane. Because she's had two courses of antibiotics, she's still got lung ache. And we went... And I didn't have medical insurance for her. But I get SAG insurance, Screen Actors Guild. So we went to a registry office in Los Angeles. And then we went straight to ER.

• 42:40Jessie Ware?

  And then she was entitled to it.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  And then she got medical insurance. Not that I ever put the paperwork in, it's rubbish and I never claimed it back. But we didn't know, and you're like, if you go to hospital there, it could suddenly be a million dollars after a week. Turns out, they did a bunch of scans. She came out sounding disappointed. She went, "I haven't bloody well got a clot." And I went, "That's good, love. That's actually good." Anyway, that was our wedding.

• 43:00Jessie Ware?

  That is so bonkers. To avoid... That is an amazing story.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  To get health insurance.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  In America, you don't want to go to hospital if you haven't got health insurance. My mate Daniel, I took him there for the night once. Took him... They'd just had a baby, so his missus couldn't take him. So I drove the other side of LA, took him to hospital at like 2 o'clock in the morning. We left at 6 in the morning. It was 40 grand.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  And he had to pay five of it or something and insurance paid the rest. And it was like sixty, sixty dollars for each Neuraphen. And ten dollars for the cup and twenty dollars for the water. It was a bunch of nonsense. So, yeah, that's why.

• 43:30Jessie Ware?

  So do you think Ruby is owed like a proper?

• 43:33Speaker 04

  They've asked a lot. Ruby and her sister Lily have asked us a lot. So the thing is, that's just our wedding anniversary, January the third, but the truth is our real anniversary was Halloween. And we were at drama school together and we went to a stage manager's party and we got behind these Venetian blinds and we started snogging. On Halloween and that's for us, that that is the nights that we became a couple. No, although our feet were sticking out from under the blinds and I do remember other members of our year going, who's that behind the blinds snogging? Someone said Emma and Jason. They went, Emma and Jake? You're fucking kidding me. Give that a week. Anyway, here we are thirty seven years later.

• 44:04Jessie Ware?

  So you should get married on Halloween?

• 44:06Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying. I said we renew our vows at a Halloween ball. We're all dressed up and Emma goes, I'm not dressing as fucking Frankenstein's wife. And I went, you can dress as anybody you like, marry on to anyone. She goes, no, I'm not doing it. Uh, but now she's come around. She said she will do it. And I've said to the kids now, I said, do you want us to have a nice big wedding or would you like an apartment when you're older?

• 44:26Speaker 04

  So we haven't had one.

• 44:28Jessie Ware?

  Um, can we um, talk about, I I'm interested, your mother had four boys, um, that's four different.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  Nightmare.

• 44:36Jessie Ware?

  Four different bar mitzvahs?

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:38Jessie Ware?

  Like, what was your theme? Were you allowed a theme at that time?

• 44:43Speaker 04

  Oh, Ruby burying me. Oh my god. It was the nineteen seventies. It's not a good look.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  I would like to know. Were you living in London then?

• 44:49Speaker 04

  Living in Edgware, yeah, yeah.

• 44:50Jessie Ware?

  I'd like to know about the outfit that Ruby's talking about.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Uh, Stonegrove.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Is that orthodox?

• 44:56Speaker 04

  You know, I liked the, my mum was a, you know, very odd and feminist and the fact that the women made to be sit separately in all those synagogues she wouldn't have. Um, and neither would I. I mean, I saw that to be wrong too. Um, but what I looked like, I had huge, overblown, uh, hair dried, kind of bouffant hair. A gigantic white colour on a blue shirt, a velvet jacket, large, what looked to me like clown shoes now and flares, it being nineteen seventy six. And, uh, and a gold chain, of course. It was a present. It was a bar mitzvah.

• 45:29Jessie Ware?

  Was it a mukandov?

• 45:29Speaker 04

  No, it was a little ID thing. In fact, years later, I thought about it. I played a footballer called Tony Kay in a Paul Greengrass film, and we filmed in Liverpool, and I was in the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, in the sauna. And there was a gangster in there talking to me, who was looking for Tony Kay, because he owed him money from thirty years before.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Were they the ones, the crap pools guys?

• 45:49Speaker 04

  No, no, it was a guy who, a whole other story, you don't want to go into. But the point is, I was in the sauna with a guy wearing a chain like I'd worn for my bar mitzvah and an ID bracelet. It was hundred and twenty degrees in the sauna. I was thinking, that is branding you, and you're that tough that you don't care.

• 46:04Jessie Ware?

  My friend got branded in the sauna last week. She had a little like, um, initial for her, her son Louis. She's got an L backwards. She's like branded her chest. Yeah, I know, shame. Nightmare.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Have you got any tattoos? Talking of branding.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  No.

• 46:19Jessie Ware?

  You?

• 46:20Speaker 04

  No, you were like, no, no, I'm too scared. I'm very indecisive. Most of the time I order something at the restaurant, just for the way it gets to the kids. I go, actually, you know what? So the idea that I would live with a decision on my body, it's not.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Are you a Libra?

• 46:32Speaker 04

  You said that with such insight. No, I'm not. No.

• 46:36Jessie Ware?

  Do you not believe in astrology?

• 46:38Speaker 04

  It's not whether I believe in it, it's like, do you believe in gravity? It's utter bollocks, Jesse. Tell me why. Come on then.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Of course it is. Jesse's a rose.

• 46:45Jessie Ware?

  I bet you're Libra moon rising, that's what you are.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Oh, Jesse, shut up.

• 46:48Jessie Ware?

  I now sound like Chelsea in White Lotus.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  The idea that people can be divided into twelve categories of human beings, it's nonsense.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Tis nonsense, Jesse.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Your personality is determined by where the stars.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Or crystals. Jesse loves a crystal.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Let me ask you this, though, because I'm fascinated, because I just stayed in a haunted hotel, and it scared the shit out of me, and I sat.

• 47:05Jessie Ware?

  Do you believe in ghosts, then?

• 47:07Speaker 04

  I don't believe, I don't want to believe in them, but I'm terrified of them, and I think one might have sat on my chest two nights ago.

• 47:12Jessie Ware?

  Oh, shut up. What happened? Do you want some more, darling?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  I don't want more, although it's fantastic.

• 47:18Jessie Ware?

  So why were, firstly, why were you in a haunted house two nights ago?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  Well, I didn't know. I was, I stayed in a hotel, and I didn't know it was haunted.

• 47:24Jessie Ware?

  Which hotel was it?

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Uh, Jesus Christ, where was I? I was in Metz. We're called Metz, pronounced Metz in France. And, and I, and I woke up in the night and something was pressing on my chest, and a wind was kind of going through the room. It felt like a plane was taking, it felt like G-forces were on me. And I fought and fought and fought to come back to the surface. Felt like I was wide awake.

• 47:44Jessie Ware?

  Were you on your own?

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Do you believe in ghosts? Because I'm terrified of them. I don't want to either. I do believe in them, and that's what scares me, because I've stayed in a few, so we felt, I was in this film called Cure for Wellness. And we shot in this compound of buildings.

• 47:56Jessie Ware?

  Oh, yes, this is the one, oh, it's.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  It's with eels and.

• 47:59Jessie Ware?

  Horrible.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Well, that series of buildings is one of the most haunted places in Europe, and ghost hunters arrived every day, and that's to put a barbed wire fence up to keep them away. And it was a series of buildings where Hitler was rehabbed after the First World War, and then he used it to rehab the injured Nazis, and then when they lost the war, the Russians took it over and they sent all their political prisoners there, and they lobotomized them. They called it a psychiatric hospital, but it wasn't, where they kind of, and there'd been loads of mass murders there. And they re- they refurbished one building for us to shoot in, but the other buildings were still dilapidated. And I shat myself. I didn't want to look up any of the windows in case I saw a silhouette there. And I remember, I, I thought, is it, are they really, I looked up what, there'd been loads of murders there, and most recently there'd been a serial killing there.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  A photographer had killed all the models on a shoot there, and it was, and I looked further, I searched online, and it was for a fetish magazine. And he'd killed them with a frying pan, and to this day, I don't know if the fetish included the frying pan, or whether they're on lunch or not, that's why.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Oh, is he going to fry them?

• 48:56Speaker 03

  No, some of those cannibal peoples do those things.

• 48:59Jessie Ware?

  That's what you did to the intruders when they came in.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. I hit them with a frying pan.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  Anyway, I'm, I am scared of ghosts, and I don't believe, so I do magic, lots of magic, I like close up magic, and I like magic, always have since I was a kid.

• 49:11Jessie Ware?

  And you do magic?

• 49:12Speaker 04

  I do magic, yeah. But my point is that, so I know about what fake psychics is, fake mentalism, and fake cold reading and hot reading and all that stuff. And so I'm disturbed by the fact that there are some things I can't explain, because lots of things I can explain, where people are on television doing stuff, and I'm like, no, that's just a trick. But there are some things I can't explain in life, and I'm relentlessly curious about those things. Can I do magic? Yeah. I'm, I'm never far away.

• 49:33Jessie Ware?

  What have you got?

• 49:33Speaker 04

  I've got, I've always got cards in my pocket.

• 49:35Jessie Ware?

  Oh, my God, stop, because you, okay, well, this leads us on to, you've just been at Great Ormond Street this morning, haven't you?

• 49:40Speaker 04

  I did magic tricks for a kid this morning in the cancer ward, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:43Jessie Ware?

  Um, how did you get connected to Great Ormond Street?

• 49:46Speaker 04

  So I was in the film with Peter Pan, maybe, maybe one of the best films I've ever been in, actually, which is ironic, because it was the biggest flop, and it kind of destroyed everyone's career for a while.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Who did you play?

• 49:54Speaker 04

  I played Wendy. No, I played Captain Hook. Who do you think I played and played?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  You played-

• 49:58Speaker 04

  And Mr Darling.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Mr Darling, not J- not Jim.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  James Bayes.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Oh no, but he's not in it. I've got confused. Because you were talking about J M Barrie and I thought maybe it was involved-

• 50:09Speaker 04

  He wrote it. J M Barrie wrote it. So, uh, he left his royalties to Great Ormond Street Hospital and in fact, the British Parliament brought in an act that extended his royalties because most royalties, uh, stop after fifty years. So money continues to go there. So I have a relationship with Great Ormond Street and I get to go and help them raise money for it. It's an amazing, magical place. It's the best place, uh, to send your kids if they're sick. Hopefully, nobody listening will ever have to send their kids up. If you do, there's no better place in the world to send their kids. And they're also a centre for incredible research and at the moment they're building a brand new giant cancer centre. So I'm helping them raise money, but also when I go, if anybody's interested in meeting someone from Harry Potter, I go around and I meet the kids and give them morphographs and, uh, and do magic tricks and stuff like that. So I, I, uh, this morning I was with this lovely kid called Alvy and he's, uh,

• 50:52Speaker 04

  he's been there for a while. He will be there for a while and, uh, and he was a Harry Potter man. So it's, it's one of the great joys. It's a bit naff being famous. It feels, uh, empty and, uh, I get embarrassed by the social status you get when you meet people who are genuinely impressive or do extraordinary things. But if you can use it sometimes to, you know, lighten people's load or do something good, it just feels like it's swinging the pendulum.

• 51:12Jessie Ware?

  Seems like you do quite a lot, Jason.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Growing up, my mum always did something of service. She didn't work. She was from that generation of women didn't do jobs. I'm sure she would have run the country if she had, but she did Samaritans, for instance, growing up in Liverpool where you weren't meant to meet people, but they were always at our house for dinner. Uh, and then she did during the seventies, she smuggled Jews out of Russia. We had a bunch of political distance staying at our house. K G B were monitoring our house. Our phones were bugged. She and a bunch of other North London Jewish women pretended to go on holiday to Russia and they smuggled in medicine and, uh, and stuff, Jewish stuff, menorahs and stuff like that. And they smuggled people out. They demonstrated in Parliament. They were always doing stuff.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  This was your mum?

• 51:47Speaker 04

  She, she never stopped doing stuff for other people. Now, she was a bit broken, my mum. She'd been broken a lot by a terrible childhood. She was a very damaged lady, but she had a huge heart. She always sided with underdogs everywhere and, uh, and she worked for them all, all her life. And, and being an actor is, is a- You know, I enjoy it. I enjoy lots about it, but I am often ashamed of the way you get treated and the fact you get free shit and people. So any stuff I can do that offsets that, uh, it's not become a good person. I'm essentially instinctively rather selfish and I like flattering and all the other stuff that comes with it. But my, uh, there is a better self in me that knows the more I can do for other people, the less I, less shitty I feel about.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  You really admire your mum. You've talked, you've mentioned her a lot.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  She was a nightmare, my mum. She was a very, very typical woman.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  What was her name?

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Linda. Actually, her name was Sheila. She went to school and there were five Sheilas, so they called her Linda. Because of that, she didn't give us any fucking middle names. I've always wanted a middle name. I've got nothing.

• 52:40Speaker 03

  Oh, shame.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  I know.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Did she have Linda as her middle name?

• 52:44Speaker 04

  That's what they had. The teacher went, I'll call you Linda, because there are too many Sheilas, and she was Linda for all of her life, and she resented it.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  That's my gag.

• 52:49Speaker 04

  So she stole middle names off of us.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  There's no more Lindas in, I don't know that it's a, a current name.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  No, but they do go in fashion, so, so, you know, Lily and Ruby, which are essentially upstairs, downstairs names, they're maid's names. They were, it was my grandmother's name, Lily. And then, then Lily named her little sister Ruby when she was in the, she wasn't booking any change. We said, oh, let's write that down and we'll become this. She goes, no, Ruby. We said, well, Ruby's, well, that's definitely on the list. And she then renamed all of her toys Ruby. Ruby Teddy, Ruby Elephant, Ruby. So, uh, Ruby was always gonna be Ruby.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  It's a good name, though.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  It's a very good name. When Emma was pregnant with her, we were at the premiere of Black Hawk Down, and a guy comes up to me with two assistants either side. He's got four assistants. And he goes, hey, Jason, how you doing? Remember me? And tells me his name, which I didn't want to say now. And I go, yeah, I do. He was, he was an agent. I met years before. He was the director of a film I'd been in, but he was an agent. I said, oh, sure, I remember. I went back, we, we came to your house for barbecue. So I'd never seen a house with a tennis court and a swimming pool before. And he goes, yeah, good you remember. Is that your lovely lady wife I saw you with or with? I said, yeah. He goes, may I ask, is she with child? And I said, she is, she's pregnant. He said, that's fantastic. And I either started in the assistant, went, it is, that's wonderful, that's great. He said, do you know what you're having? And I said, yeah, we're having a, a little girl. He goes, they're the best. And the, and his assistant goes, they are, they're, they're the best. Girls are the best.

• 54:00Speaker 04

  He said, do you have a name? And I said, uh, yeah, well, after Lily, after my grandma. He goes, Lily's a beautiful name. And I, and I said, well, thanks so much. I said, obviously, if my grandma had been called Bertha, we would have thought differently. And he just paused, stopped, and he went, you remember my wife's name, Miss Bertha? And I'm pretty nimble on my, I could think of some way out of most things and I just had nothing and I went, oh. Yeah. Nice to see you.

• 54:26Jessie Ware?

  Right, whilst you talk about the last supper, I'm gonna get the ice cream out.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  So, I'm going to give you a last supper.

• 54:33Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 54:33Speaker 03

  But, I'm going to allow you to transgress.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Well then I'll have spare ribs.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  For dessert, I'll have spare ribs, a slow cooked lamb.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Uh.

• 54:45Jessie Ware?

  Say the exact ribs, because you have a specific.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Well, okay, there was a restaurant, I mean, there was a hole in the wall called the Man Hong in Edge, I grew up. Made these ribs, we never knew what they were made of, we never knew what the recipe was. They were so delicious that I have crossed oceans of time to go, I've driven for hours to go there. I would buy three portions, one to eat in the car outside, one to eat in the car on the way home and one to then share with Emma when I got there for years and years. My brother-in-law, who is a brilliant chef, chef, he was the head chef in restaurants for a long time, now he has a denim company. He at one point went, you know what, they're the best things I've ever tasted in my life, I'm gonna spend a week and I'm just, I'm gonna.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  And which is this restaurant?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  It's closed down now, it's a tyre shop. And then when I went, I went there and it was, I had a burst tyre and they went, I said, I used to come to this restaurant my whole life. My whole family came in, he said, you ate it in this place? Jesus, when we knocked it down, the kitchen was like four inches thick in cockroaches and dead rats and I went, well, whatever they did in there. It's the, and I've been in search of ribs that tasted like this in some of the most expensive Chinese restaurants in the world, never had anything like it.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  So, it's spare ribs to start?

• 55:47Speaker 04

  No, no, this is my dessert, because I'll have a vegan meal.

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  I still do care, to be honest, I make jokes about it, I do hate being vegan and it is a nightmare and I do miss me every day, but I do think it is the right thing to do for the planet and probably for me too.

• 55:59Jessie Ware?

  So yeah, that's a vegan, you, I, just because we are gonna save the world today, it is vegan ice cream.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  I recognise it from a distance. Do you know what vegan ice cream always is and most vegan sweet things are? Fucking coconut. And you see it and you look and it's in tiny writing, like they've written your name on a grain of rice. Who wants coconut? And you go, I don't want coconut.

• 56:15Jessie Ware?

  Do you not like coconut?

• 56:17Speaker 04

  Well, no, what, not when you pretend it's vanilla or strawberry or chocolate.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  I'm sure my vanillas are definitely gonna pop out.

• 56:22Jessie Ware?

  Don't, don't do it, Em.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  I can't afford to.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  My favourite dessert is actually sticky toffee pudding and ice cream, you know.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 56:28Speaker 04

  There's no, there's no greater dessert in, in the world.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Do you think?

• 56:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. With all the, you know, the sauce that comes with it, the kind of caramel toffee sauce and a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Vanilla is your favourite ice cream?

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, with that, yeah, yeah.

• 56:39Jessie Ware?

  Could you give us a nostalgic taste that can transport you back somewhere?

• 56:43Speaker 04

  Take me back to my childhood. When I was a kid.

• 56:45Jessie Ware?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  I just couldn't get, I still can't get enough of sweet things. I can't have a whole packet of biscuits, I can't have old cake without even thinking about it. But, uh, when I was a kid.

• 56:52Jessie Ware?

  Hmm.

• 56:53Speaker 04

  My dad used to, my dad still plays golf, he's ninety-two though, he rarely hits the ball. But, um, he used to take us on Friday after school. All the men would go to this golf club and they would throw all the the kids in a field with cut down nine irons, buckets of balls and Coke floats. We'd have a pi- a big pint glass with Coca-Cola in it and vanilla ice cream which frothed up.

• 57:12Jessie Ware?

  Oh delicious.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  And I just, I lived for Coke floats. I remember being in the field with kids, I remember the smell of the grass, I remember the, the sense of naughtiness, I knew my dad was having a beer with some other people. It was so evocative of other things. Obviously the taste of my childhood is Friday night dinner. We had different things every night, but Friday night was always.

• 57:29Jessie Ware?

  The same.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Chicken soup, chopped liver, roast chicken and potatoes that would give you a heart attack. Um. I miss that.

• 57:35Jessie Ware?

  I, I think that you should write the story about your mum.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  You're not the first person to say that.

• 57:41Jessie Ware?

  I mean, it's just a no-brainer, surely.

• 57:44Speaker 04

  She was so complicated. Oh, those, yeah, the thirty-five, they were amazing, these women, they, they generally smuggled people out of the country and they foxed the KGB. You know what else they did? They developed amongst themselves, actual spy craft. How to keep things secret from the KGB, how to pass secret messages, how to smuggle things into the country. How to win, how to protest, they were extraordinary activists, yeah.

• 58:09Jessie Ware?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 58:11Speaker 04

  I don't know, I can't write my mum, I had such a troubled relationship with her. She had dementia at the end, I think I was waiting for an apology from her. But in the end, she turned back into the sweetest child. And I was holding her hand when she took her last breath and it was, I didn't get the chance for, I guess, the big conversation I thought we needed, but maybe I got what I, what I wanted, but I got what I needed in the end. All the layers of protection and spikiness and anger dropped away from her.

• 58:37Jessie Ware?

  Oh, Jason, it's been such a pleasure to have you on. I feel like we could do a part two.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  No, I think we could do a week.

• 58:43Speaker 04

  I feel like we could be friends.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Jason Isaacs, yeah.

• 58:46Jessie Ware?

  Thank you so much for coming on, for being so transparent, for being so opinionated, for being so fabulous. You are welcome anytime you have to promote a film and we will feed you well.

• 58:57Speaker 04

  I'll be back every week.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  And I've resisted objectifying.

• 59:00Jessie Ware?

  You did really well.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  But I do think you're very humble.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  No, you fancied a man with a fake chest, you know.

• 59:07Jessie Ware?

  And a fake Willie.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  You know, and a fake Willie, you know.

• 59:23Jessie Ware?

  Well, I feel like we were just getting started with Jason Isaacs.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  I think we need a week.

• 59:28Jessie Ware?

  Thank you so much to Jason Isaacs for coming on, for giving an anecdote about literally everything.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Everything.

• 59:35Jessie Ware?

  I loved it.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  I loved it too.

• 59:37Jessie Ware?

  And although self-proclaimed fussy eater, ate everything.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was good at that. Yeah, it was good. Lovely to meet his daughter as well.

• 59:46Jessie Ware?

  Oh, yes, Ruby.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Food was absolutely delicious.

• 59:49Jessie Ware?

  It was a bit spicy, though.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Bit spicy for me, could only have half.

• 59:53Jessie Ware?

  But it works. It was a really nice lunch to make, actually.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Delicious, really lovely.

• 59:59Jessie Ware?

  Flatbreads I need to work on, quite chewy, but full of flavour. Thank you to Jason Isaacs. His film, The Salt Path, is out this Friday, 30th of May. Go see it, it's really beautiful. We'll see you next week.