In an interview with Vulture’s Andrew Goldman, British actor Jason Isaacs made a beautiful, salient, humane point about why he wears the yellow hostage pin to all his press and red carpet events.
The actor best known for his role as Lucius Malfoy in the “Harry Potter” franchise and most recently, wealthy Southern businessman Timothy Ratliff, whose empire is about to crumble (and who for some reason doesn’t know how to wash a mixer), in “The White Lotus,” has been wearing a yellow pin to all his red carpet appearances this past year.
But even here at Kveller, we were reticent to determine whether they were cancer pins or hostage pins. We knew that the actor is Jewish and has family in Israel — but the actor had not publicly spoken on behalf of the Israeli hostages, more than 50 of who are still being held in Gaza — that is, until now.
“I wear the hostage pin because there are innocent people who were taken from their homes,” the actor stated plainly, mentioning how many of the hostages were and are peace activists, and how some volunteered to drive sick Gazans to the hospital and marched for peace.
“There are people being starved and tortured and raped who have no access to the Red Cross,” he said. “People are rightfully talking and thinking about all the civilians that are in danger everywhere else. But those people in tunnels, it’s now 600 days they’ve been there, they’ve been forgotten entirely.”
Isaacs divulged that after the first time he wore the pin, he was contacted by hostage families who thanked him. “I now am aware that they are watching me and that it matters to them,” he said. The father of two said that if he had a relative that was being held in a tunnel and “weighed 25 kilos now, or may have been strangled or shot, and it felt important to me that some actors somewhere wore the yellow hostage pin, then who am I to not wear it?”
The actor has personal ties to Israel. Isaacs’ mother, Linda, a passionate advocate for Soviet Jewry who made aliyah in 1987, passed away in Israel in 2014, and the actor got to be by her side after shooting for his show “Dig” was interrupted by the Gaza War. She is survived by her husband Eric, Jason and his three siblings and their children.
Isaacs acknowledges in the Vulture interview that there are so many “complicated arguments,” about Netanyahu, “the right-wing lunatics in the cabinet,” the IDF’s conduct, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s efficacy and press presence and the reliability of Hamas’ narrative, and while he doesn’t wade into any of these, he does make one thing clear.
“What I wish for everybody, obviously, is peace,” he said. “Who doesn’t? I don’t know anybody, apart from the extremists on all sides, who want either continued war or tension.”
When asked why more actors and celebrities don’t wear the pin, which Isaacs, like the hostages’ families and allies, asserts is not a political symbol, he responded: “Because just for wearing it, I’ve been called a Zionist baby killer, a Zionazi,” a reality we’ve all seen play out on any remotely pro-Israeli — and many innocently Jewish — posts on the internet.
It’s clear that the online hate is not stopping the Jewish actor from visibly standing up for the hostages, not surprising from an actor who is known for his chutzpah. In the article, “The OA” star recalled confronting his former “The Patriot” co-star after Gibson’s 2006 antisemitic tirade. When a friend convinced a reluctant Isaacs to participate in a fundraiser with Gibson, he greeted him at the event brazenly with a: “Rabbi Gibson, how are we?”
Iconic.
