Well, that didn’t take long. Days after he attempted to take the penis out of the conversation surrounding his recent decision to hang dong on The White Lotus, Jason Isaacs has issued a retraction. While it was indeed strange for professional broadcaster Gayle King and her cohorts at CBS Sunday Morning to repeatedly ask if that was really Jason Isaacs’ white lotus on a recent episode of The White Lotus, Isaacs admits he used the wrong words in his response. In particular, when asked about his penis, he brought up a “double standard” in the entertainment industry because he didn’t see anyone discussing nudity in Anora or The Substance, despite him believing Mikey Madison’s “vulva” got plenty of screentime. He’s sorry about that now.
“I said the wrong words in the wrong way,” Isaacs told Variety. “I used the phrase ‘double standard,’ which I didn’t mean at all. There is a [different] double standard—women have been monstrously exploited, and men haven’t.”
Isaacs says he was “tired” and that his statement “came out wrong.” However, his attempt to “lightheartedly” change the conversation from, in the parlance of Emilia Peréz, penis to vagina came at the expense of Madison and Margret Qualley, which he regrets.
“I absolutely should not have mentioned those two actresses, whom I respect enormously,” he said. “Mikey Madison, I’m a massive fan of. My point wasn’t that men have had a harder time than women—that would be absurd. Women have had a monstrous time on camera forever, and I hope to God that is changing[…]women have been exploited forever in cinema and made to be gratuitously naked and asked totally inappropriate questions.”
Nevertheless, Isaacs maintains that the constant questioning about whether or not he was wearing a prosthetic penis struck him as “a bit weird and slightly obsessive”—not to mention “embarrassing and inappropriate.”
“I thought I could have fun batting it off, but I batted it off very poorly.”
Lesson learned. Perhaps next time Isaacs wants to shut down the dick discourse, he should throw a curveball back: Yes, it’s real, but it isn’t mine.