When quizzed about the Israel-Hamas conflict in November 2023, he told The Independent, “It’s just such an enormous thing to talk about that I don’t think it can be tacked onto a publicity interview.”
His wearing of the yellow ribbon pin also stirred a minor controversy after a Sky News journalist airbrushed his pin out of interview footage while he was promoting the White Lotus.
Alongside Gillian Anderson in new fllm The Salt Path[Missing Credit]
Family and upbringing
Born in Liverpool on 6 June 1963 to his Jewish mother and father, a jeweller, Isaacs was raised in a tight-knit Jewish community in the suburb of Childwall, co-founded by his Eastern European great-grandparents. The family moved to London when Isaacs was 11, and he attended Haberdashers' Aske's School in Elstree at the same time as David Baddiel. Sacha Baron Cohen and Matt Lucas are also alumni.
Being Jewish played a significant role in his childhood; he attended youth club in the local shul of King David High School and cheder twice weekly.
He told The Jewish Chronicle in 2008: “I feel my Jewish roots are my core. I went to cheder all my young adult life, and my parents live in Israel. I’d like to join a shul where they welcome children of a mixed marriage. I feel profoundly Jewish but not in a religious way. I love the tradition through the ritual and the songs, but when I read the Seder in English it’s nonsensical… But Judaism has wonderful things to offer.”
He added in 2009: “I love being Jewish. I love the traditions. I love everything that makes me bond instantly with other Jewish people, my tribal connection. But I don’t think I will be passing it on to the next generation.”
Growing up with three brothers and experiencing antisemitism during the the rise of the National Front during his later teenage years, Isaacs has said that facing bullies in his childhood was preparation for playing the crueller characters that have landed to him as an actor.
"There is a streak of cruelty in me that comes from having a quite combative background,” he told The Telegraph. “I've been bullied a lot, sometimes by my brothers, sometimes at school. It wasn't a great thing to be a Jewish teenager when the National Front were passing leaflets around the school."
And he told The Independent in 2013: “There were constantly people beating us up or smashing windows. If you were ever, say, on a Jewish holiday, identifiably Jewish, there was lots of violence around. But particularly when I was 16, in 1979, the National Front were really taking hold, there were leaflets at school, and Sieg Heiling and people goose-stepping down the road and coming after us.”
Jason Isaacs on stage during The BRIT Awards 2025 at The O2 Arena (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
That antisemitism led his mother, father and brothers (who became a doctor, a lawyer and an accountant), to make aliyah in 1988.
“They felt so uncomfortable as young people and were so defined by their experience being Jewish during the 1930s and Forties," he said of his parents’ decision to stay in Israel.
His mother Linda died there in 2014, when Isaacs was in in the country due to filming the TV show Dig in Jerusalem. Disruption to the filming schedule, due to rockets fired from Gaza, meant he was able to say a proper goodbye.
Isaacs decided on an acting career while at Bristol University, where he had stumbled into a theatre audition, and he remained in Britain.
Jewish roles
Most notably, Louis in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Isaacs auditioned for the Royal National Theatre production knowing that he wanted the role of the Jewish anxiety-ridden Louis who was loosely based on the Jewish playwright, and pushed for it.
While the London producers were said to have had a bigger part in mind for the rising star, Isaacs said: “Look, I play all these tough guys and thugs and strong, complex characters. In real life, I am a cringing, neurotic Jewish mess. Can't I for once play that onstage?”
Set at the start of the Second World War, the 2008 film Good, which starred Viggo Mortensen, featured Isaacs as a Jewish German therapist. He prepared for the role by listening to recordings from the liberations of Bergen-Belsen, and reported feeling moved by the sound of prisoners reciting Jewish prayers and singing the Tikvah.
What has he said?
On Rosh Hashanah September 2020, he posted on X: “It's the Jewish New Year. 5781 years of stress, running and guilt. No wonder we have bad posture. It's supposed to be a time of rebirth, re-imagining and, over the next 10 days, of reflection. May it be sweet and fruitful for everyone and herald the start of something better. X”
Controversies
Isaacs faced backlash after filming in Jerusalem in 2014 for the TV show Dig – created by Israeli writer-producer-director of Homeland Gideon Raff – in which he played an FBI agent opposite Anne Heche, Lauren Ambrose and Ori Pfeffer. The production was shut down and relocated after rockets were fired out of the Gaza strip, and the show was cancelled after its first ten-episode season.
