Freezing rain is lashing the roof of the movie-set trailer. Even with the heating on full, the conditions are still shivery. But Jason Isaacs is sporting the sort of deep tan that suggests months spent under fierce sun. Appropriately, given the role he’s playing, it’s fake. “They spray-paint me every single day,” the actor explains. “At the place I’m staying, I don’t know what the laundry thinks has been going on, with these dark brown sheets every morning.”
These intensive cosmetics reproduce the Los Angeles-broiled face of the movie star Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite leading man, the star of North By Northwest, Charade, Notorious and To Catch a Thief, and the No 1 box office superstar smoothie of the mid-20th century. For Isaacs to play him in ITV’s forthcoming four-part bio-drama Archie, a fake tan was only part of the transformation. “When the makeup comes off at the end of the day,” he says, “there’s almost nothing that’s me. The chin and nose come off. The eyes aren’t my eyes.”
