"Harry Potter" star Jason Isaacs is opening up about his "decades long" addiction to drugs and alcohol, something that had "dire consequences."
"I've always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I'd already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades long love affair with drugs," he said while speaking to The Big Issue. "Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible. No message would get through for nearly 20 years."
Now sober, Jason, who played Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" film series, recalled his first drunken experience at the age of 12.
"The barman, who we thought at the time was a hero and I now realize belonged in prison, sneaked us a full bottle of Southern Comfort," Jason, 57, said. "We drank the entire thing in the toilet, then staggered out into the party, reeling around farcically."
As result of the alcohol experience, Jason vomited, kissed a girl, destroyed property and left himself blooded after tripping and hitting his head on the pavement.
He loved every second of it.
"The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache, stinking of puke with a huge scab and the memory of having utterly shamed myself," he said, adding that he couldn't wait to do it all over again.
"Why? I've no idea. Genes? Nurture? Star sign?," he wondered. "I just know I chased the sheer ecstatic joy I felt that night for another 20 years with increasingly dire consequences."
Jason gives no details as to what those consequences were, but his lifestyle had an effect on his mental state. The actor eventually grew to be depressed and even happily envisioned his support system crumbling.
"I remember there being a moment, not long before I got clean, when it suddenly occurred to me that if everybody I knew died, literally every single person, I probably wouldn't mind that much," he said. "In fact, I might like it, because then it would be an excuse to sit in a room by myself and take drugs and everybody else would say, well you know, fair enough, you heard what happened didn't you?"
Thankfully, he's overcome those demons. Asked what he would tell his younger self now, Jason said, "I think what would surprise the 16-year-old me is that I'm okay. That I manage to find simple happiness in simple things. Not always, not perfectly, but enough."