“I went to the set, and they had this idea of me wearing a pinstripe suit, short black-and-white hair,” Isaacs recalls. “I was slightly horrified. He was a racist, a eugenicist. There’s no way he would cut his hair like a Muggle, or dress like a Muggle.” So Isaacs suggested instead that he wear a long white wig, and a particularly ostentatious wizard-like ensemble. “In order to keep the hair straight, I had to tip my head back, so I was looking down my nose at everyone. There was 50 percent of the character. I asked for a walking stick, which [Chamber of Secrets director] Chris Columbus first thought was because I had something wrong with my leg. I explained I wanted it as an affectation so I can pull my wand out [of the cane]. After a second’s thought, he said, ‘You know what, I think the toy guys are going to love you.’ He was completly right.”
Next: Malfoy’s accent. “There’s a particular art critic in England who has a voice like fingernails on a blackboard,” says Isaacs, who in real life has a far more accessible, slightly working class London accent. “I combined him with a teacher I thought was patronizing and sadistic when I was in drama school. To me what [the accent] smacks of is a sense of entitlement. I just wanted to find a voice that made him drip with the millennia that his family had been in power — complete disdain and contempt for anybody and everything else.”
Isaacs goes on to talk about director Chris Columbus's reaction to the accent and Daniel Radcliffe's (Harry Potter) opinion of it. You can read the rest of the article here.
(SOURCE: THE LEAKY CAULDRON)
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