'Harry Potter' star Jason Isaacs reveals his 'decades-long love affair' with drugs

Jason Isaacs has revealed that he had a 'decades-long love affair with drugs', before eventually getting clean.

The 57-year-old actor, who played Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies, said that he has always had an 'addictive personality'.

He goes on to say that his struggle with substance abuse endured for almost 20 years, from first getting drunk at the age of 12, and then 'passing through' drinking into drugs by 16.

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Writing for The Big Issue, he explained that his first brush with alcohol was sharing a bottle of Southern Comfort supplied to him by a barman, but after a night of chaos, vomitting and injury, he simply wanted to do it again.

“Why? I’ve no idea. Genes? Nurture? Star sign? I just know I chased the sheer ecstatic joy I felt that night for another 20 years with increasingly dire consequences,” he says.

He then moved on to drugs, explaining that ‘every action was filtered through a burning need for being as far from a conscious, thinking person as possible’ and that ‘no message would get through for nearly 20 years’.

“I thought I was broken. I remember there being a moment, not long before I got clean, when it suddenly occurred to me that if everybody I knew died, literally every single person, I probably wouldn’t mind that much,” he writes.

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“In fact, I might like it because then it would be an excuse to sit in a room by myself and take drugs. I know now that’s not true and never was. I love, I feel, I connect, I care. We all do. The drugs weren’t a way of dealing with that sense of distance, the drugs were causing it.”

Isaacs was born in Liverpool, but moved to London aged 11, and has previously spoken in interviews about being bullied at school and experiencing anti-semitic abuse growing up.

He revealed his struggle with substance abuse in the Big Issue's 'Letter To My Younger Self' series.

“I think what would surprise the 16-year-old me is that I’m OK,” he adds.