Jason Isaacs Shares His Hopes for The OA Being Saved from Cancellation

The OA may have been canceled in 2019 by Netflix, but the desire to see the show return is still strong, both for fans and the people who created it, including actor Jason Isaacs who tells Yahoo he thinks they “could always go back” one day.

Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, The OA follows a mystery surrounding a woman named Prairie Johnson (played by Marling), who disappeared seven years earlier and, after returning to society, can now see and call herself The OA. Isaacs played the role of Dr. Hunter Aloysius “Hap” Percy in the series.

Speaking about the show in a Role Recall interview with Yahoo, Isaacs admitted that when he first heard about the cancellation, he was left “in tears” while “in a phone booth in the rain” because of how much he loved the show and was sad to see it go off the air.

“You never say never. We left it, we can always come back to where we left it,” Isaacs says. “It had a profound impact on people all over the world, tens of millions of people watched it and loved it.”

“You know, people have done movements in front of the[Netflix]headquarters and they’ve done it at the Louvre, they’ve done it at Trump Tower and all that, and still in the industry, and with journalists, it’s the topic they want to talk about the most. People come up to me and say, ‘Can you tell Brit Marling she’s a goddess?’ I say, ‘I will,’ and they say, ‘No, I mean a real goddess, I do white magic and she’s a goddess.’”

“They started shooting with someone else and after a week they realised that his agent had maybe been slightly dishonest, he didn’t really speak English and didn’t know how to act, didn’t know what a brand was, was taking phone calls in the middle of a scene.

“So they called me late one night – they knew me from a short segment I did before called Nine Lives a few years ago – and they said, ‘Do you like this stuff? And if you like it, will you get on a plane right away because you’re shooting in Grand Central Station tomorrow?’

“I had never read anything like it, and I came in and met Brit for the first time in character at Grand Central Station and I mean, it was… you knew doing it, there was something special. But when you meet people from all over the world, other things they talk about like they love that pretense, they love the playfulness and the disguise, but it’s real, or feels real, to a lot of people.

The Harry Potter star called the series “special” even though he feels like he’s “only a small part of it,” adding that when the first season came out he was completely blown away by the storytelling.

“I was going to do a press conference the next day in London and I hadn’t seen it,” Isaacs says. “They kept messing up the link, and finally they sent me the link at 9 p.m. I thought, ‘Well, I better go to bed, but I might watch the first part just to see what the tone was.’ I watched the whole eight hours straight and finished around 5 a.m.

“I sent this glowing email (to Brit and Zal), and then I went to bed for two hours to get up to do press, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I write last night?’ And I looked at it and I was like, ‘No, I mean it, I still mean it,’ and I still mean it today when I say that embarrassing thing.”

“An actor who thinks his role is good, I’m not talking about my role, I’m talking about his role,” he adds jokingly. “The humanness of their stories, their characters and their interactions defies analysis. There’s something special about those two.”

Reflecting on the moment he learned the show wouldn’t make it past a second season on Netflix, he continues: “The day it got canceled, I was in a phone booth in the rain on Baker Street sobbing. I was pathetic, it was pathetic.”

But despite the show’s cancellation, Isaacs is confident it will one day be picked up because the creators have the entire story in hand. The OA also wouldn’t be the first show to be saved from cancellation, if it is picked up elsewhere.

“Unlike everyone else who’s done this kind of crime series, they had created five seasons of The Maze Runner before they started,” Isaacs says.

“They wrote the whole first season, so it was an auction, there was a bidding war for the show to get it. You could see from the story that there was no development there, no one was thinking, ‘Why don’t we make it a little bit more like that?’ It’s different from everything else, so you can’t put it into a mold.

The OA seasons 1 and 2 are available now on Netflix.

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Video: Jason Isaacs looks back on his incredible career at Yahoo