Initally, when Archie star Jason Isaacs first heard about a Cary Grant project in the works, he wasn’t at all interested in playing the famous actor. Because, as he tells Consequence, “what kind of moron would want to play Cary Grant? He was the biggest film star in the world for 30 years.”
However, Isaac’s perspective changed gradually, as first he learned that the writer behind it was Jeff Pope (Philomena, Stan & Ollie), who “has written some brilliant things before, and they were always complex and rich and human. And I thought, ‘Well, he’s not an idiot. He surely wouldn’t expect an actor to play Cary Grant. What’s the point of that?’ And then I read it, it’s called Archie, and then I realized, of course, it’s not about Cary Grant, it’s about Archie Leach. And Archie Leach struggled to play Cary Grant himself, and certainly couldn’t play him in his private life.”
To write his portrait of the star, whose career highlights include some of the greatest films of the 20th century, Pope used Dyan Cannon’s book about her complicated relationship with Grant as a primary source. This allowed Pope to create a portrait of a man who, as Isaacs describes, was “a tortured human being with incredible scars, open wounds from his childhood that only got more and more open as he tried to make himself feel loved by getting the entire planet virtually to worship him — and feeling even more unlovable than before. Because he knew it was all fake.”
As depicted in the series, with Laura Aikman playing Cannon, Grant and Cannon’s relationship becomes increasingly toxic after their marriage. “He wooed her by playing Cary Grant to her, too, but once they shut the door and they came home, he just turned into a control freak and a monster, and a very, very difficult man full of rage and regret and self-hatred and many other things,” Isaacs said. “And I thought, ‘Well, that is playable as an actor.'”
To play not just Cary but Archie himself, Isaacs did extensive research on Grant’s life, from speaking with Grant’s daughter Jennifer Grant and Cannon, to reading “every single biography that existed,” to examining the minutes of business meetings and Grant’s divorce papers.
“He certainly was a code switcher. He learned to please people, to make them want him — very early on, he was a male escort when he was in New York,” Isaac says, adding that “hunger was a huge factor in his life, when he was a little kid — Dyan has told us that not only would he eat his own meals, he would eat everyone else’s meal. He couldn’t bear any waste, because that instinct to eat everything always never went away, even when he was a centi-millionaire.”
The toughest challenge for Isaacs was finding any recording of Grant talking outside of the context of a role. “He didn’t give any live interviews, ever. He wouldn’t let people record interviews, because he was very aware that the mask would slip. It’s one thing preparing himself for things on camera. It’s another being caught candidly. So the one thing that eluded me the whole time was having any idea what he sounded like, who he was when he was having a conversation.”
Eventually, Isaacs tracked down a person who, as a student journalist in 1986, had spoken with Grant on the phone — and had a secret recording of the whole conversation, despite Grant telling him at the start of the interview not to record it. Isaacs says that when he found the write-up of the interview, he could tell it was a transcript of a conversation, and so “I asked him if he’d play it for me. And he refused, because he’d respected Cary Grant’s wishes for 40 years.”
Then, Isaacs begged. “I just needed to know what he sounded like when someone dropped a plant pot on his foot, because he certainly didn’t sound like he did in North by Northwest. And eventually, very graciously, he agreed to play me the tape, as long as I didn’t make it public.”
On the tape, Grant did indeed sound quite different from his movie star persona, as Isaacs recollects: “The accent, dialect-wise was a little bit more English. Jennifer had already told me, ‘Dad was more English. He was always correcting my American accent to be more English.’ Making her say automobile instead of automobile. So he was more English.”
In addition, Isaacs got additional insight from a portion of the interview in which Grant was asked to pick the best actress he ever worked with. Grant picked Grace Kelly because “she was so relaxed. He said, ‘That’s the hardest thing to do.'”
It’s a statement that Isaacs disagrees with. “If you ask most actors, I don’t think they would say the most difficult quality to have in acting is to be relaxed. But for him, it was, because he worked at creating the brand ‘Cary Grant’ a lot. And that’s what I heard, was someone who wasn’t working at sounding a particular way. He let his guard down and I could hear who he was and what he was feeling, which is something that he hid.”
Archie (Britbox)
As Isaacs continues, “It’s one of the reasons that that character was so iconic, Cary Grant, because you don’t really know what he’s feeling, ever. It’s something that Hitchcock picked up on, his ability to be manipulative and cold, and cast him in Notorious and Suspicion and things like that.”
What Isaacs heard on that tape, as well, was “him at the end of his life. I heard the fault lines. I heard insecurity. I heard the sense that he felt misunderstood. I heard overconfidence. I heard all of the colors that are missing from the films and that I’d felt were missing from my idea of who he was. And that was the final piece of research.”
The later episodes do depict a Cary Grant who “began to heal when he stopped trying to find anyone who would love him enough, and started to love his own child. You can seek love from people who adore you as the whole world did, and his various wives did. But it’s never enough if you feel that you are unlovable. It’s a bottomless pit. But when he had a kid, he started to love her in an uncomplicated way. And that was the beginning of redemption for him.”
It’s not impossible to imagine a project like Archie existing as a feature film as opposed to a limited series. But as Isaac notes, “I do think long-form television is a place like novels where you can explore and have complicated, complex characters. Films require you to be more simple, and if you are going to explore any character in any great detail or three-dimensionality, it’s normally one person, never more than one. There’s something about long-form television where you really get a fuller picture of people.”
In this case, that fuller picture isn’t very flattering to one of film’s most famous icons. However, the concept of movie stars being far more complicated behind the scenes isn’t something that’s unusual for modern audiences to consider. Says Isaacs, “That’s why we all love the downfall of the rich and famous, to be reminded that they’re like us.”
However, as Isaacs continues, “Actually, Cary Grant wasn’t like us. He was much, much worse. The extremity of his behavior when he was an adult is a reflection of the poverty emotionally and financially that he went through when he was a kid. Those scars never healed for him, in our show. That, that I understand. And and his desperate search for any kind of peace. If you feel that unlovable, you’re just going to drive everyone away. They’ll never give you enough love. They’ll never do it the right way. And so it felt like a story that was contemporary.”
What made it contemporary, in particular, was today’s relationship with fame. “More and more people come through our phones and screens who we are meant to think have perfect lives,” Isaacs says. “And this man who had the most perfect life, was a living God, was one of the most broken human beings you could find.”
All four episodes of Archie are streaming now on Britbox.