 WITH his flashing sapphire blue eyes and razor sharp cheekbones, Jason Isaacs is particularly good at being bad. And in his latest film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the Liverpool-born actor exceeds himself as the wicked wizard Lucius Malfoy. Despite being an immensely amiable character in real life, Jason admits that he enjoys tapping into the dark side for many of his finest screen moments. After all, who could forget the sadistic Colonel William Tavington in The Patriot? "They're like bad meat," he says of playing people we love to hate. "They stick in your teeth for a long time. "Besides, the public rarely forget the villains because they make you angry, which is what I'm hoping to do with Lucius. "I think baddies, if you get them right, stay with you and make your flesh creep. But more importantly, you want to stay with them because you want them to be toppled." According to Jason, the secret of getting people to loathe a screen character is to make them believable. That's why he looks for inspiration in some of today's dictators. "I normally look for redeeming features in a bad guy," he explains. "A micro scan found nothing, but I did find things I could believe in. "You don't need to look very far in the newspapers to find similar characters. If you swap the word muggle (non wizards) for any other ethnicity in the world you find similar figures throughout Europe." Lucius believes very strongly in the purity of wizard blood and that's quite chilling on screen. "It has a resonance and then I had something to hang on to," he says. "So, I clung to the idea of a man not liking the way his world was being swamped by the newcomers. And I thought I'd found a way into making him real and repulsive at the same time. "The thing about great children's literature is that it doesn't pull any punches." Sitting in a press conference, surrounded by wide eyed journalists, Jason admits that he was desperate to be in the latest Harry Potter film. He had auditioned for the part of Snape in the original movie but got pipped to the post by Alan Rickman. "Everybody I knew was either in Harry Potter, or auditioning for it," he laughs. "Certainly everybody has read at least one of the books to their children and if you're a British actor you couldn't have missed being around when they were casting for the screen version. "So I finally got the call and it was like 'Thank God.' There was something on the net the first time it came around and somebody sent it to me. I wasn't quite sad enough to look for it myself. "They sent me a page saying I was going to be playing Snape and so I phoned up my friends and said: 'What's this character Snape?' They just replied, 'We think it's Alan Rick-man.' "It was a bit upsetting and sure enough, it's because he's sensational in it. So the first film went by and then I got the call for the second one. I went in and they said would you read Lucius Malfoy and I said 'What's he like?' They said, 'He's really evil.'" | 
