Jason Isaacs & Gillian Anderson Researched Deeply For Their "Beautiful" New True Story-Inspired Drama The Salt Path

Jason Isaacs: Well, I read the book and I looked online to see if there were interviews, and then I met Moth, and that changed everything for me. Gillian and I went down and spent time with Moth and Ray, and they're such an amazing couple. Moth, particularly — Gillian will have to speak [about] Ray, as Ray's quite guarded. But Moth is the most lovable, the most social, the most convivial. He's like a handsome Father Christmas. [Chuckles] He's got this shock of white hair, and he just wants you to have a good time. My first meeting with him was like this, on Zoom, and I watched it back because there's a technical aspect to this film for me. For those viewers who don't know the true story, it's about a couple who lost everything: their house, their money, their future. And in that same week, when they were suddenly bereft of everything, he also realized that this condition he thought was arthritis was actually a terminal neurological condition called corticobasal degeneration. So, I asked him about those things before I went to meet him, and as an actor, you get licensed to ask people about the most difficult things in your life. When you realize you're going to die, what's it like forgetting things, and what is it like when your bowels pack up and your wife has to get you dressed in the morning and your legs don't work? I watched this Zoom back, and we were laughing, laughing and laughing and laughing. And I thought, "God, what a d--k I am laughing! " I realized, "No, he wanted to make me comfortable. " Moth is such a lovely, generous man. He wanted me to feel comfortable, so he made a joke about everything, made it seem hilarious that he couldn't do these various things. His wife had to do it for him, but he's a manly man, proud man, and he lost his ability to provide. Obviously, because they lost everything to provide for his children, any kind of future was erased, and then he lost his ability to be a man in so many ways. His wife had to do so many things for him, and his generosity and his optimism, and or at least the fake optimism he had when that happened to them at first, to try and keep his wife's spirits up, although he felt suicidal and responsible for it all. It's just an amazing thing, and he's an extraordinary man. So, normally, if there's a real life story, you go into as much as you can, see what you can pick up. In this instance, just meeting him and then seeing them together, how much they love each other, how something like this could have driven people apart — you know, tragedies and trauma in family often separates people. This drove them even closer together, and they're so different from each other. So yeah, that was the research, such as it was, reading the book and looking at the script. The script doesn't have a lot in it. There's not a lot of talking in the film. Nature was a massive part of healing in their relationship, and actually in his condition, amazingly, miraculously. So, it was just about releasing myself into trying to channel him, loving Gillian, and seeing what nature could do. Because nature, frankly, had a lot to do with this film. There were days we had to hide from the wind and the rain and the hail, and days where we were blistering in the sunshine, like they had. Except they had it for six months, and they had nowhere to go afterwards at the end of the day.