Jason Isaacswho plays Lucius Malfoy in the upcoming sequel film Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secretstold SCI FI Wire that doing a Potter film is unlike any other experience in front of the camera. "My first day [on set] was going to Quidditch," Isaacs said in a phone interview from Australia, where he's filming a live-action Peter Pan (playing Captain Hook and Mr. Darling). "I was sitting in the Quidditch stands with Alan Rickman and Miriam Margolyes and Warwick Davis, and various extras who were all playing witches and wizards. And the assistant director was saying, 'Right, OK, Harry's nearly got the snitch, Harry's nearer.'... And you were doing kind of Wimbledon acting with your head." Isaacs mimics the assistant director's tone: "'But Draco comes in ... and the snitch!' ... And one of the witches turned to one of the other witches and said, 'What's a bloody snitch?'"

Isaacs added, "In normal acting you're kind of dredging up these complicated emotions, and [meanwhile] we're all there dressed as if we were going to a Halloween party, following an imaginary boy on a broomstick fly around in the air. I thought, this is too much fun to get paid." Isaacs said that his costume stems from his own thoughts on what Lucius Malfoy would want to wear. "My idea, that director Chris [Columbus] liked, was that, because Lucius comes from this old wizarding family and that's what's important to him, like the British House of Lords, he kind of lives in the past a bit, and would like the future to be like the past. So he should wear old earthy furs and things that have been in the family for many, many generations."

Malfoy "isn't a terribly complicated man," Isaacs said. "I always look for some redeeming feature, any kind of human qualities. But you know, this is slightly broader strokes, being a children's book, and it's quite nice to be so unfetteredly unpleasant. To just try and do fingernails on the blackboardI want people's skin to crawl when I'm on the screen. So it was fun in every scene." In forming his distasteful bad guy, Isaacs admitted that he tapped his own real-life experiences. "There were a couple of people I based it on, who I found to be very unpleasant in my life," he said. "One person was a terrible bully, and another person I just can't bear to hear."