The White Lotus star Jason Isaacs has retracted his awkward comments about showing off his magic wand during a full-frontal scene in the Mike White show.
After getting a bit frustrated by the sheer amount of dong questions during the latest press round, he made some poor comparisons. Look, everybody wanted to know if he was wearing a fake penis or showing off his own equipment, and he was sick of the microscope on his penis. Literally.
He told journalists that it was “interesting” there was so much conversation around his nude scene, because Oscars Best Actress winner Mikey Madison didn’t have any chat about “her vulva” for her role in Anora.
“It’s interesting that there’s a double standard for men,” he said. “But when women are naked, Margaret Qualley as well, in The Substance, nobody would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things.”
Not only was he wrong — Qualley was asked if she used prosthetics, and we never saw Madison’s vulva on screen — but when it comes to a double standard, it’s usually women getting the short end of the stick.
Isaacs has now told Variety that he used “the wrong words in the wrong way”.
“I used the phrase ‘double standard’, which I didn’t mean at all. There is a [different] double standard — women have been monstrously exploited and men haven’t,” he said.
“It came out wrong, and I was tired — I’d done so many interviews,” Isaacs explained. “I absolutely should not have mentioned those two actresses, whom I respect enormously. Mikey Madison I’m a massive fan of. My point wasn’t that men have had a harder time than women — that would be absurd. Women have had a monstrous time on camera forever, and I hope to God that is changing.”
He added that White possibly uses male nudity in The White Lotus to “redress the unfair balance” we’ve seen in the past. He told the publication that “women have been exploited forever in cinema and made to be gratuitously naked and asked totally inappropriate questions”.
However, he still wanted to drive home the point that it’s kinda weird to ask him so many invasive penis questions.
“I had been asked so many times in the same day by journalists, ‘Are you wearing a prosthetic?’ Which means, ‘Have I seen your actual penis? It’s very important for me to know if I‘ve seen your penis’,” he said.
“It just strikes me as a bit weird and slightly obsessive.”
In the end, none of these journalists had seen Isaacs’ actual penis, because Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook told TV Insider he wore a prosthetic in the scene.
I guess everybody had their balls in a twist over nothing!
Lead image: HBO
