Jason Isaacs was hooked on Tetris and hasn't played games since
But he's appeared in loads of them!
Jason Isaacs — the stalwart British actor that you'll recognise from roles in Harry Potter, Star Trek Discovery, The Death of Stalin and more — doesn't play video games, due to the fact that he was previously obsessed with Tetris.
This hasn't stopped Isaacs from appearing in loads of games as a voice actor, though, including this year's darkly comic indie The Last Worker and the upcoming Baldur's Gate 3.
He also featured in Marvel's Midnight Suns in recent memory, and he provided a lot of voice work for the original SimCity back in the day.
At an event in London earlier this year, where Isaacs was promoting his work on The Last Worker, the actor told RadioTimes.com exclusively about his relationship with gaming. Or lack thereof! See what he said in the video above.
"I'm very addictive," Isaacs explained. "I've always been an addictive person. So I don't play video games. Because when I did, I was one of these people that played Tetris and dreamt shapes.
"I dreamt blocks. I saw blocks, not just when I was sleeping, but in my daily life. I knew I had to stop when I was looking at people, imagining how I could turn their background into shapes that fitted into the available space."
Isaacs added: "And so I didn't need explaining to me, when the new waves of technology came along in the '90s, that it was designed in order to keep us from living our lives, because I had already experienced that."
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All of that being said, Isaacs is still very in tune with technology.
He told us: "I'm an utter geek. I've been an early adopter my whole life. I was on the internet a long time before the World Wide Web came along. I was on newsgroups and bulletin boards.
"And a long time before FaceTime, I was on CU-SeeMe, if anyone remembers that original programme."
Read more: James Buckley was playing Football Manager when his first child was being born
"So yeah, I am surrounded by gizmos," he added. "And I talk to them, and I look at them, and I listen to them all the time. And I'm aware what a slave I am to them.
"I read a lot about it too. And I'm aware how it's designed to give me the very physiological hits that keep me addicted. And yet, I can't break that cycle."
Isaacs continued: "Sometimes, when one of my machines breaks — if, for instance, my phone — there's these gadgets that were meant to free up our time and give us all this unlimited leisure time.
"If, for some reason, it's not working, or I lose it, or it runs out of battery, I can sense the panic in me.
"And at the same time, I sense that parallel release and relief that comes from being unconnected to the world. And I wonder how soon the fashion for digital holidays, if it will ever take hold. Because I'm utterly enslaved."
As you can tell, Isaacs is very passionate about all this! And someone missed a trick by not casting him in the Tetris movie.
You can watch a longer edit of the interview below:
The Last Worker, in which Isaacs plays a Liverpudlian robot, is available now from retailers including Amazon.
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