Jason Isaacs makes noble, failed effort to stop people speculating about his penis

The White Lotus star made a valiant effort to remind CBS Mornings host Gayle King that asking him about his dick is weird, actually.

By William Hughes  |  March 15, 2025 | 1:54pm
Photo: Fabio Lovino/HBO
TV News The White Lotus
Jason Isaacs makes noble, failed effort to stop people speculating about his penis
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Jason Isaacs does not want to talk about prosthetic penises, a conversational gambit he does not seem to have realized, at the time, would generate a fairly staggering number of headlines with the words “prosthetic penises” and “Jason Isaacs” smooshed together in them. Isaacs launched this noble, but also instantly failed, effort to de-penis-ify the conversation in the aftermath of the most recent episode of The White Lotus, in which he had a brief full-frontal scene. A lot of people have speculated that Isaacs took the—let’s be clear—completely normal and rational decision, as an actor on a very well-viewed TV show, to use a prosthetic for the sequence, rather than putting his actual genitals on display. “A lot of people” in this case including Gayle King and the rest of the cast of Friday morning’s installment of CBS Mornings, who ended up in a fairly protracted back-and-forth with Isaacs when they decided to ask him whether he’d used a prosthetic for the sequence.

When accused by King of dodging the question, Isaacs was clear that, yeah, he was, because he perceives a major double standard here: “Well, I’ll tell you why, because the best actress this year is Mikey Madison at the Oscars. And I don’t see anybody discussing her vulva, which was on [the screen] all the time … so I think it’s interesting that there’s a double standard for men. But when women are naked, Margaret Qualley as well, in The Substance, nobody would dream of talking to her about her genitalia or her nipples or any of those things. So, its odd that there’s a double standard.”

Interestingly, King’s co-host, Tony Dokoupil, seemed to get a little irked at the concept that he and his co-workers shouldn’t be asking Jason Isaacs about his dick as part of a Friday morning news show, interrupting the conversation, after it had fully moved on from this obstruction, to say that, actually, he would ask an actress about their vulva, were prosthetic vulvae a well-known aspect of making prestige TV. Isaacs joked back by asking “What is your obsession?” before trying to pivot, unsuccessfully: “Mike White is a brilliant writer; it’s the best series on television for a long time. And what is the obsession with penises? It’s an odd thing.” (Isaacs was having at least a bit of fun here; at one point he remarked “I don’t think that people really want to know how the sausage is made,” with a very knowing smirk.)

 
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