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"He&amp;#039;s become a familiar face in US television drama, but Jason Isaacs has returned to home shores for a second series of BBC One&amp;#039;s detective drama Case Histories - based on the best-selling novel series by author Kate Atkinson. Speaking to Digital Spy, Isaacs reveals how it felt to play the show&amp;#039;s lead Jackson Brodie again after two years away, his plans for the future and whether a third series of Case Histories is on the cards...  Case Histories first aired in 2011 - was it just your busy schedule that meant we&amp;#039;ve had to wait for series two? &amp;quot;Yeah, I went to America to make a different television series [NBC&amp;#039;s Awake] and made that for a long time, then made some films, and then when they wanted to make [series two], to be honest, I said no, because I was living in America with my wife and my kids are in school\u2026 &amp;quot;But it was my missus who said, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re kidding - you&amp;#039;ve got to go and do more Case Histories&amp;#039; - she took the full burden of being alone, looking after the kids, [because] she, like me, just loves Jackson Brodie and the terrible scrapes he gets into\u2026 and how human and irritating and fabulous he is.&amp;quot; So you did seriously consider turning series two down? &amp;quot;I did - I just didn&amp;#039;t know how it was going to work. I don&amp;#039;t like leaving my family ever for long periods of time and this was 6000 miles away. But they were very kind, because it took a month to shoot each episode so they scheduled it so that between every episode, I went home for 3 or 4 days. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not that easy to go to Los Angeles and come back again, just &amp;#039;cause you&amp;#039;re knackered all the time, but it&amp;#039;s better than not seeing [my family] for months. So we made it work, because in the end, you&amp;#039;ve got to do good work when it comes along and Kate Atkinson&amp;#039;s books are so fabulously entertaining and complex and human. I just don&amp;#039;t get the opportunity to find writing like that most of the time.&amp;quot;  After your first film, you&amp;#039;ve exhausted Kate&amp;#039;s novels and are branching out into original material. Did you have any concerns about that? &amp;quot;Yes, tons of concerns, we all did. We were very worried. But Kate helped us out with some storylines and the occasional tweak - she&amp;#039;d come in and go, &amp;#039;What are you doing?!&amp;#039; and smile and fix it, like some IT whizzkid who sets your network up! &amp;quot;So she was involved, although she didn&amp;#039;t write them, and the dynamics and the relationships are things that were set in motion by Kate, so they lead where they lead. There&amp;#039;s a DNA to the way Jackson&amp;#039;s stories work, which is that he will invariably do the wrong thing in every instance where it&amp;#039;s to do with his personal life and he&amp;#039;ll try and do the right thing when it comes to his professional life. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a very noble and fearless individual and incredibly instinctive when it comes to peeling back the layers of what&amp;#039;s holding other people back, and not just finding out when and why a crime was committed, but how people are crippled or imprisoned by their pasts\u2026 &amp;quot;But he just can&amp;#039;t see himself clearly at all, so in his love life, he&amp;#039;s continuing to be found shagging the wrong people and the person he loves [Amanda Abbington&amp;#039;s DCI Louise Munroe], he treats in all the wrong ways and blames her for it. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s trying to be a great father and failing at that too\u2026 and hopefully [does] all those things in an entertaining fashion. One of the many things I love about Jackson is that his life is lived not just to a country music soundtrack, but like it was a country music song - and there&amp;#039;s a wit to that which I rarely find [elsewhere].&amp;quot;  Speaking of songs, I hear you were spinning a few tracks on set? &amp;quot;Well, that&amp;#039;s a thing I picked up in America that a lot of people do. When it&amp;#039;s cold and grey and miserable and wet, and it&amp;#039;s 5 o&amp;#039;clock in the morning, there&amp;#039;s nothing better than blasting out a bit of Stevie Wonder or the Bee Gees to have a bunch of grumpy guys in fleece tapping their toes! &amp;quot;All of a sudden, everybody&amp;#039;s moving at a slightly brisker pace and it makes the set a jollier place. Whenever I could, I&amp;#039;d whack music on - I didn&amp;#039;t always want to wake up people in the Edinburgh tenements!&amp;quot; Did you find it easier playing Jackson second time round? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s always easy when the writing&amp;#039;s good - that&amp;#039;s the truth. Acting is a relatively easy job if everyone else has done their job so brilliantly and because of the strength of Kate&amp;#039;s writing and I think because the first series was very popular, we had magnificent actors in [series two]. &amp;quot;Victoria Wood came along to star in the first one and we had these great Scottish actors, some of whom came back from America - James Cosmo, Maurice Ro\u00EBves, Gary Lewis. These are all fantastic actors who I&amp;#039;ve seen and admired over the years and they all jumped at it, because the characters are rich and surprising and that&amp;#039;s one of the things that&amp;#039;s absent from so much drama, particularly crime drama. &amp;quot;[They lack] the ability to surprise the viewer - when you first meet a character, you know exactly what they&amp;#039;re going to do and who they&amp;#039;re going to be, and that&amp;#039;s just never true of Kate&amp;#039;s writing. Case Histories is an unusually complex and nuanced drama, and it never forgets to be entertaining at the same time. It never gets too pretentious or up itself.&amp;quot;  You&amp;#039;re an exec producer on Case Histories and you also produced Awake - do you enjoy the opportunity to be involved with a show on multiple levels? &amp;quot;Well, if possible - if I&amp;#039;m invited to be part of the conversation about scripts, or the shape or look of the thing, I&amp;#039;m never short of an opinion or three. But it&amp;#039;s a bit of a relief occasionally to turn up and just learn my lines - I&amp;#039;m happy to do either. But if you&amp;#039;re involved in a long-running show or a show that takes this much time, it&amp;#039;s nice to be part of all the conversations and not just some of them.&amp;quot; Over the past few years, you did Awake for NBC and you just shot a pilot for CBS. Are you keen to keep working in the US? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not about whether it&amp;#039;s American or British. I&amp;#039;m trying to find a balance between being a good dad and a real presence in my wife and children&amp;#039;s lives, and doing good work, and not Skype-ing every day! I love work, I love storytelling - I think there&amp;#039;s a value to somehow both entertaining people and reflecting the human condition back at them. It makes us all feel connected when you do it right. But I need to make sure that I&amp;#039;m there to read stories occasionally and go to the school play, so it&amp;#039;s just about trying to find a balance between the two. &amp;quot;I have been based in LA previously and it&amp;#039;s just about where the good work is. I don&amp;#039;t think I could take off for a year to Mexico or New Zealand or any of those places. I couldn&amp;#039;t do it if my family wouldn&amp;#039;t come with me.&amp;quot;  What do you think is the reason for the &amp;#039;British invasion&amp;#039; of US television? It seems like every big US drama has a British lead these days\u2026 &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s a combination of Skype and cheap flights! It&amp;#039;s available now - the Americans will look at anyone, they&amp;#039;ve very happy to cast anybody who puts themselves up for [a role]. Young British actors nowadays - and my generation, older British actors - realise that you can submit yourself for those things. &amp;quot;So my mate James Purefoy is doing The Following and Dave Morrissey is doing The Walking Dead\u2026 there&amp;#039;s lots of us out there. Game of Thrones is full of fantastic British actors, but they&amp;#039;re in Ireland most of the time. &amp;quot;But I think there is a strange arrogance that can lead to these conversations where people say that British actors are better, or Australian actors are better, and it&amp;#039;s just utter nonsense. It&amp;#039;s just that there&amp;#039;s a giant pool for them to cast from - they make tons of stuff and they&amp;#039;re not snotty about it, the Americans, they&amp;#039;ll look at anybody who walks in the door or sends a tape in\u2026 which is great for British people!&amp;quot; Even though you&amp;#039;ve exhausted the source material, can you imagine doing a third series of Case Histories? &amp;quot;Oh, in a heartbeat. Hopefully people will enjoy watching it as much as we enjoy making it. If we keep attracting fantastic actors and fantastic writers and directors - people who really want to do it - and the public have an appetite to see it, I certainly wouldn&amp;#039;t mind getting beaten up every five minutes the way Jackson does! I spent most of my time in a dumpster or under a car&amp;#039;s wheels, but it&amp;#039;s worth it. As long as they keep supplying me with biscuits, I&amp;#039;ll be happy!&amp;quot; Case Histories continues tonight (Sunday, May 26) at 8.30pm on BBC One. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/interviews/a483274/jason-isaacs-case-histories-qa-jacksons-irritating-and-fabulous/>