Jason Isaacs

Jason Isaacs joins Brent Spiner and Jonny Frakes on Dropping Names, and he arrives doing card tricks, admits he screenshotted every stranger online who complained about his North Carolina accent in The White Lotus, and confesses he was not the first choice for Timothy Ratliff. He was not the first choice for The Patriot either. That part came to him only because Jude Law stepped aside, and Isaacs walked into the room with a swagger he got from a rental car upgrade at LAX, then talked Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin into rewriting his villain until Colonel Tavington was burning churches and shooting children. Seven months in Thailand with the White Lotus cast gets described as part Lord of the Flies, part Mean Girls, and Isaacs is clear that the worst behaviour on any set is never the actors.There is a lot more here for anyone who knows him as Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter, as Captain Hook in P J Hogan's Peter Pan, as Michael Burnham's Captain Lorca on Star Trek Discovery, or as Hap in The OA. He explains why Peter Pan flopped and then quietly became a family staple, why he went to Hollywood jail after it, and how the OA job came to him at midnight after a Hungarian poet did not work out. He talks about being blown off the screen by Saoirse Ronan on Stockholm, Pennsylvania while she was also shooting Brooklyn, about doing Pinter's The Dumb Waiter with Lee Evans, about the West Wing set where a semicolon was a semicolon and Janel Moloney gave him a freebie, about getting sober while Stanley Kubrick was still lighting Eyes Wide Shut down the hall at Pinewood, and about growing up in a Jewish community in Liverpool before the law degree that lasted two weeks. Brent and Jonny also get him going on why the famous people nodding at him now will stop nodding next year.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

**Make healthy eating simple. Get Huel today with my exclusive offer of 15% OFF orders $50+ online with our code [DROPPINGNAMES ] at huel.com/DROPPINGNAMES. New Customers Only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show!**Jonathan Frakes and Margo Martindale have both been telling people they met at Harvard for forty years, and neither of them ever bothers to add the part where it was a summer production of The Threepenny Opera with Christopher Reeve playing Macheath, badly, right before his beeper went off with the news that he had got Superman. That friendship is the spine of this one. Margo joins Brent Spiner and Jonny on Dropping Names to trace the whole route, from Miss Jacksonville High School and Cecil Pickett's classes in Texas, through four years at Actors Theatre of Louisville alongside Kathy Bates and Mary McDonnell, to originating a role in Steel Magnolias off Broadway and watching the film go to bigger names. She also explains the entrance she once made in a very serious Irish play with a long tail of toilet paper stuck to her shoe.Then comes the directors list, and it is absurd. Clint Eastwood never called action on Million Dollar Baby, he just told her to start when she felt like it and let her know afterwards that it was good for him, then went to the golf course. Sidney Lumet taped out the whole set on the floor and later rang up to ask how she felt about playing a part written for a Hispanic man on 100 Centre Street. Sydney Pollack flew her in from holiday for Sabrina and then shot her in the dark. There is Days of Thunder with Tony Scott, The Hours, The Human Stain, Secretariat with John Malkovich and Diane Lane, an Emmy nomination for playing Bella Abzug in Mrs. America, laughing herself sick in Ireland while making Cocaine Bear, the real spies she interviewed for her podcast during The Americans, and the story of how Will Arnett talked her into voicing herself on BoJack Horseman as Margo Martindale, esteemed character actress, a job title she now uses constantly.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rick Berman says there were three strikes against the job: it was science fiction at a time when nobody made science fiction for television, it was a sequel, and it was going out in syndication instead of on a network. He and his wife Liz talked it over and, by his own count, it took about six minutes to decide to go for it. That decision gave us Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and the films, and it all traces back to an eye roll in a Paramount meeting that got him invited to lunch with Gene Roddenberry. On Dropping Names, Rick tells Brent and Jonny how Bob Justman came back from a reading at UCLA insisting Roddenberry meet an English actor named Patrick Stewart, how Gene declared that no bald Englishman was going to be his next captain, and how Rick decided that was not actually the end of the conversation. Along the way Brent admits he nearly walked out of his own audition rather than play Data as a machine, Jonathan confesses to wearing the same unwashed shirt through seven auditions for Riker, and Rick explains the rule that whoever said a name first set the pronunciation for the whole series, which is how Data became Data.There is also the studio executive who told Patrick he had the role but had to lose the wig, the reason Colm Meaney could slip away to make features, Marlon Brando wanting the part that went to Malcolm McDowell in Generations, Isabella Rossellini reading for the Borg Queen before Alice Krige got it, and how Jonathan came to direct First Contact. Before any of that, Rick was a young documentary producer catching flies in the basement of a Horn and Hardart automat for a film John Lennon and Yoko Ono were shooting, which is why Yoko later tapped him on the shoulder at Lincoln Center and greeted him as the fly guy. He also worked two days at Groucho Marx's house, stood five seconds from Howard Hughes on a Las Vegas runway while Hughes fired his boss, took phone calls from Lenny Bruce in college, and shared a babysitter with George Gershwin, give or take fifty years. Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Jerry Taylor and the green writers who became showrunners all get their due, and so does the night Elizabeth Taylor ended up face down on a floor two doors from Rick's house.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Colin Hanks sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonny Frakes on Dropping Names and starts where it started, on a sidewalk on the Fox lot in the late nineties, terrified before his Roswell screen test, when a passing Jonathan Frakes told him to do well and somehow made the whole day survivable. From there he opens up the parts of that story nobody knows: getting asked to test for two roles at once to double his odds, spending the day auditioning alongside Heath Ledger, sitting in a cast meeting about people not showing up while William Sadler quietly modeled how a professional behaves, and learning off camera eyelines from Julie Benz. Then comes the reveal about The Great Buck Howard, the film he made with John Malkovich, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn and Adam Scott. His father Tom Hanks produced it and campaigned hard for a completely different actor in the lead, and the name is William Shatner. Colin also explains why a George Takei joke had to survive every draft, and why one small scene with Jack Carter still lands as the saddest moment in the picture.There is a lot more where that came from. Colin talks about surviving Dallas in 108 degree heat on The Good Guys with Bradley Whitford, who invented the role of emotional stunt double and who still gets quoted every time Colin finishes a take. He tells the Kreskin story that saved his David Letterman appearance while he was doing 33 Variations on Broadway with Jane Fonda. He describes realizing during a three in the morning squib explosion on set that he could shoot an entire documentary on the same tiny camera, which became the Tower Records film, and how the Eagles of Death Metal doc about the band returning to Paris after the Bataclan attack took seven months and cost him something. Brent and Jonny push him on Nuremberg, on watching Russell Crowe and Rami Malek run twenty pages in a single take in Budapest, on the critics who savaged The Offer, on Matthew Goode as Robert Evans, on Orange County and King Kong with Jack Black and Peter Jackson, on Adam Sandler calling to talk about Emma Stone after The House Bunny, and on how he badgered his agents into a meeting with Matthew Weiner and ended up playing the priest on Mad Men. Plus the scoop on Silo season three with Rebecca Ferguson, the biggest production he has ever worked on, bigger than Kong.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When Terry Matalas first walked into Alex Kurtzman's company, the show about bringing Jean Luc Picard back was already spoken for, and he was politely told to go away, kid. He ended up running Star Trek Picard season three anyway, and on Dropping Names he tells Brent and Jonny how it came together in about eight weeks, why the character we know as Data was very nearly called Datum until somebody worked out that data is already plural, and what Brent said to him on the phone that changed his mind. Jonathan Frakes remembers being asked if he was ready for a lot more Riker and answering that he would need to lose thirty pounds first. Terry also explains the last shot of the poker game, where he asked the cast to stop acting and simply deal, ran the cameras and let the credits roll over the real thing. Mary Howard, the producer who hired him as a production assistant and became his first boss, sat in the room for part of this one, which makes his stories about Rick Berman, firing shoes with tassels and the last Star Trek that ever came in on budget land even harder.There is a lot more here than the Enterprise D, though Brent has plenty to say about how much smaller it felt the second time around and about hitting Patrick Stewart with a car. Terry talks about running 12 Monkeys for four seasons on Syfy after writing a time travel spec called Splinter, meeting Aaron Stanford and most of his crew on Nikita, working on Terra Nova and MacGyver with Henry Winkler giving notes in the edit bay, and the day Brannon Braga's assistant job put him at a sushi lunch where Ron Moore pitched the entire Battlestar Galactica reboot to him before anyone had made it. He is currently finishing the Marvel series Vision Quest with Paul Bettany, James Spader, Todd Stashwick and Orla Brady, and he refuses to name the one actor in it he is most excited about. Also covered: Christopher Lloyd shaving his own eyebrows on day one, the life sized Darth Vader that would not fit in the basement, the DeLorean time machine parts in Terry's garage, and Brent's very short career in the Star Wars radio drama.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

William Shatner sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names and opens with the moment he still cannot let go of, the time Neil deGrasse Tyson answered him on camera by putting a hand in his face and pushing, hard enough that Shatner went backwards. From there he gets into the kidney stone a Canadian gambling company called him about a week after it was removed, the doctor who handed it back over, the seventy five thousand dollars it fetched at auction and the Habitat for Humanity house in Louisiana that money helped build. There is also the fresh cigar in Cabo San Lucas that put him on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, a full body scan at half past seven that morning, and a cardiologist telling him that two more years of medical advances buys him another ten.He goes back to the early days too, to live television in New York when he was the twenty three year old with theatre training who could hit a mark and knew his lines while a camera the size of a bookcase rolled into his face, to Queens with a wife and a baby and a subway ride into town, to Harold Clurman nearly firing him from a play until Julie Harris intervened, and to Judgment at Nuremberg, where he sat at the lawyers table watching Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracy work. He talks about Yul Brynner on The Brothers Karamazov, Lorne Greene and Bonanza killing his series For the People in the ratings, Christopher Plummer coming back as a Klingon, and Brent remembering the Stephen Hawking poker game on The Next Generation. Then it turns to what he is chasing now, a podcast with his daughter, a Brad Paisley album, a heavy metal record, and a long conversation about feeding artificial intelligence the whole of human writing and what happened the night it wrote him a poem and he started to cry.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Leonard Maltin once walked Red Buttons over to say hello to Paramount's goodwill ambassador AC Lyles at Spago, and Red looked up and asked if he hadn't just been wondering whether AC was still alive. That is the register of this whole conversation, which finds Leonard and his daughter and podcast partner Jessie Maltin on Dropping Names with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, trading stories that only a man who reviewed films on Entertainment Tonight for thirty years and put his name on Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide could actually have. The centrepiece is the night Sammy Davis Jr. invited the Maltins up to Tower Road after a charity dinner, the gate swung open, a man at the door told them to let themselves in, and Leonard spent hours alone in Sammy's den studying the autographed photos, the Pac Man machine and the hole cut for the projection booth while the house stayed empty until nearly midnight.There is also Katharine Hepburn in her Turtle Bay brownstone, talking freely about twenty seven years of never being seen in public with Spencer Tracy while an NBC publicist fumed off camera because nobody was discussing the television movie. Leonard describes being thirteen and finding Buster Keaton reading a newspaper in the back of a car near the Brooklyn Bridge on the Samuel Beckett shoot, getting a still signed and learning it was from Parlor Bedroom and Bath. He explains the strange on again off again decades with Burt Reynolds, who was convinced the bad reviews of Stroker Ace and Cannonball Run were personal, and Jessie remembers Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman shouting at Clint Eastwood through a junket door because he would not stop talking. Dale Evans came to Jessie's bat mitzvah in a wheelchair, Gloria Stuart came too, Fayard Nicholas taught her to dance, and the two of them close by talking about their new book, Family Movie Night, the first one credited to Maltin and Maltin.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steven Weber joins Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names to tell the story of taking over Leo Bloom from Matthew Broderick in The Producers on Broadway, opposite the acclaimed British actor Henry Goodman, who was abruptly fired about two weeks into the run for wanting to do something other than what Nathan Lane had done. Steven admits he was probably on the bubble himself, that he was doing an imitation of Broderick instead of finding his own Gene Wilder, and that the show was such a juggernaut you could have put two bowls of manure on that stage and the audience would have cheered. He also recalls Mel Brooks giving notes, sitting at the feet of Harvey Korman on Dracula Dead and Loving It with Leslie Nielsen and Amy Yasbeck, and Richard Kind currently grinding through Max Bialystok in London.There is a lot more here from a career that runs from Wings with Tim Daly and Tony Shalhoub to Chicago Med with Oliver Platt and S. Epatha Merkerson. Steven talks about playing opposite Julianne Moore on As The World Turns when she was winning an Emmy playing her own twin, taking a gay lead in Jeffrey with Patrick Stewart in a pink beret and the moment a New Yorker on Christopher Street yelled Kirk at him, playing a Bajoran on Deep Space Nine, and watching Klingons smoke cigarettes on the Paramount lot. He performs the entire Tchaikovsky patter song from Lady in the Dark from memory, delivers his Burt Lancaster impression, the one that fooled Kevin Pollak into thinking he had found real archive tapes, and reads out the John Simon review that called him too comically homely for The Seagull.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wil Wheaton joins Brent Spiner and Jonny Frakes on Dropping Names and starts with the movie everyone knows him for, Stand By Me, then keeps going to the part nobody talks about. He explains how a memo from David Gerrold about the kid from Stand By Me is the reason Wesley Crusher exists at all, and how narrating the Stephen King novella The Body four decades later triggered a full five senses flashback to the day they shot the Gordie and Chris scene, right down to River Phoenix in his eyeline and the boom operator in powder blue corduroy shorts. He also talks about the touring anniversary screenings with Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman, losing Rob Reiner, and standing in a tiny green room at the Oscars trying not to fall apart while telling Meg Ryan what Joe Versus the Volcano and When Harry Met Sally meant to him.There is a lot more here than Star Trek: The Next Generation. Wil tells the story of meeting his hero Henry Rollins, recognising the Black Flag tattoo on the back of his neck, and then failing to get out of a locked recording studio door. He talks about the Family Ties job he lost to Star Trek, the director on The Buddy System who moved him around by the elbow while Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfuss looked after him, and the on set teacher Marion Fife who asked him what he wanted to do with his life when nobody else would. There is LeVar Burton blessing the podcast It's Story Time with Wil Wheaton, Ready Player One possibly being the best selling audiobook ever recorded, celebrity Jeopardy against Ike Barinholtz and Patton Oswalt, a public apology to Ken Jennings, his son Ryan growing wheat in the desert, and the line about Jonathan Frakes used to be cool that has followed Jonny around for thirty five years.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A few minutes in, Brent Spiner stops the interview cold to tell Noah Wyle, as a friend rather than a host, that The Pitt is the best thing on television and that Noah is the reason. The room changes right there, and what follows is two hours of shop talk between people who actually know each other. Noah is on Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny, and he takes them inside the ER of the mid nineties, where the casts were shooting ninety page scripts for a forty eight minute show and a young Steadicam operator in pyjamas reinvented what a television scene could look like. He remembers Quentin Tarantino turning up to direct an episode and inventing an entire unscripted piece of business about a slippery can of Diet Coke, a paper towel and a puddle for Sherry Stringfield to slip in, all of it worked out with the enthusiasm of an eight year old. He talks about the live episode, the Fail Safe broadcast with Richard Dreyfuss and George Clooney, and the moment he watched Tom Cruise walk into a rehearsal for A Few Good Men in a white t shirt and cowboy boots and understood what a star is.The conversation keeps circling back to how The Pitt actually gets made: no dolly track, no lights on the floor, no sides, no phones, lighting dialled from a board offstage, a lending library on set with a rule against bringing rubbish, background performers living a fifteen hour patient journey behind him, and one of them hiding Harry Potter novels inside a prosthetic pregnant belly. Noah explains why the show has no score, and how two music free episodes of another series became the proof of concept, and why the cast all read and worked to a pay tier so a fifteen episode drama could be shot in Los Angeles again. Brent tells the story of the glass thermometer that ended his career as a hospital orderly at sixteen, Jonny brings up the Maasai village negotiators who outbid Noah's per diem while shooting The Librarians in Kenya, and there is David Crosby in a Malibu restaurant telling Brent's twelve year old son that his father is a hero all over the world. It ends with Noah telling Jonathan Frakes exactly what fifteen years of working together taught him, and it is not about directing.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.