This charming man

Jason Isaacs plays suave Hollywood star Cary Grant in a moving biopic about his troubled life

- CAREN CLARK

NEW DRAMA

Archie

From Thursday 23 November, ITVX

The iconic scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest in which Cary Grant is chased by a crop-dusting plane is one of the most famous in movie history. And in a studio near Runcorn, it is being carefully re-created with a sharp-suited Jason Isaacs as the legendary actor…

TV&Satellite Week is on set watching filming for ITVX’s four-part drama Archie, penned by Jeff Pope, which explores how the debonair Grant, born Archie Leach in Bristol in 1904, became one of Hollywood’s best-loved and most charismatic stars – but struggled to find happiness along the way.

The drama sees Isaacs as an elderly Grant in 1986 looking back on his life as he undertakes a one-man show across America. The action then flashes back to his poverty-stricken upbringing in England – with three different actors playing the younger Archie – as his mother Elsie (Kara Tointon) experiences mental health problems and his father Elias (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) rejects him.

BENEATH THE IMAGE 

‘I had a notion of Cary Grant as the epitome of sophistication, cool and suaveness, and that made me not want the job because I’m not that,’ says Harry Potter star Isaacs during a break in filming. ‘Then I read the script and every biography and I thought, “He was a complicated, troubled, damaged and damaging human being – that I can play!” He had a traumatic childhood and struggled with shame and fear of abandonment.’