Which Iconic Actor Is Jason Isaacs Calling a Bully?

In a Vulture interview yesterday, Jason Isaacs once again described an unnamed actor he worked with as “the worst bully ever and a global icon,” said the actor gave “a completely different performance off-camera than on,” and insisted that the experience “sucked” and “I’d never seen anything like it. Before, I would’ve licked the ground that this person walked on.”

Isaacs has 167 acting credits, so it’s not easy to pinpoint who he meant based on that alone. However, he has made a similar accusation before — in a 2011 interview with The Telegraph, he referred to a “famous, late, knighted actor” who “literally physically shoved me out of the shot with his elbows.”

That narrows the field a bit. The actor in question had passed away before 2011 and was knighted, which helps—sort of. As far as I can tell, Isaacs has worked with three knighted actors: Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen, and Sean Connery. Gambon didn’t pass until 2023, and McKellen is still with us (thank goodness). Sean Connery had a well-documented reputation for being difficult both personally and professionally—but Isaacs didn’t actually work with him onscreen. They were both credited in Dragonheart, but Connery only provided the voice of the dragon.

So, has Isaacs worked with any other knighted actors? Not technically. But he did work with someone he may have believed was knighted—Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films. As an Irish citizen, Harris wasn’t eligible for a UK knighthood, though he did receive honorary knighthoods from both Denmark and Malta.

More to the point, Harris seems to fit the description: a late, legendary global icon with a well-established reputation for being difficult to work with. In fact, Isaacs has spoken about Harris specifically, recalling that before their first scene together, Harris regaled him with “some of the most hair-curling, jaw-dropping filthy stories about his adventures in the ’60s and every single gynecological detail of his swordsmanship.” Harris then sat silently as Isaacs “started to sweat and panic and twitch,” finally delivering his line only after Isaacs was thoroughly unsettled. Isaacs called it “the right performance” for the character but also admitted thinking, “You bastard.”

There’s no shortage of accounts backing up Harris’s reputation. A co-star from the 1961 film The Long and the Short and the Tall said it was “the most unpleasant film I ever worked on,” partly because Harris “resented” and “despised” Laurence Harvey and didn’t get along with him. Meg Bussert, who appeared with Harris in a stage production of Camelot, said “he could be difficult.” Clint Eastwood once described him as a “mad Irishman.”

He reportedly clashed with Marlon Brando on Mutiny on the Bounty. There are also accounts that he was either fired from or walked off the set of Red Desert, possibly for punching the director. Both of his ex-wives have publicly criticized his drinking and volatility. Ann Turkel described episodes of “jealousy and paranoia.”

Harris himself once even said he didn’t “want to be remembered for those bloody films,” referring to Harry Potter, which suggests he didn’t have a lot of warmth for them.

Does that mean Richard Harris was Isaacs’s bully? Not definitively. But if Isaacs was talking about him, it wouldn’t be a shock.