“I’ve always had an addictive personality and by the age of 16 I’d already passed through drink and was getting started on a decades long love affair with drugs,” Isaacs recently told The Big Issue. “Every action was filtered through a burning need I had for being as far from a conscious, thinking, feeling person as possible. No message would get through for nearly 20 years.”

The 57-year-old actor discussed getting drunk for the first time at the age of 12 with the help of an irresponsible bartender.

“The barman, who we thought at the time was a hero and I now realize belonged in prison, sneaked us a full bottle of Southern Comfort,” he said. “We drank the entire thing in the toilet, then staggered out into the party, reeling around farcically. I vomited, fell on and pulled down a giant curtain, snogged a girl, god bless her… ran out into the street, vomited again, tripped, smashed my head open on the pavement and gushed blood all over my clothes.”

That night eventually spiraled into an addiction that he wouldn’t be able to shake for decades.

“The next morning, I woke up with a splitting headache, stinking of puke with a huge scab and the memory of having utterly shamed myself,” he said, adding, “All I could think was … I cannot f–king wait to do that again. Why? I’ve no idea. Genes? Nurture? Star sign? I just know I chased the sheer ecstatic joy I felt that night for another 20 years with increasingly dire consequences.”

His struggle with substance abuse caused the movie star to feel “broken” and depressed.

“I remember there being a moment, not long before I got clean, when it suddenly occurred to me that if everybody I knew died, literally every single person, I probably wouldn’t mind that much,” he said. “In fact, I might like it, because then it would be an excuse to sit in a room by myself and take drugs and everybody else would say, well you know, fair enough, you heard what happened didn’t you?”

Reflecting on his sobriety, Isaacs said that his younger self would most likely be shocked that he is doing alright today.

“I think what would surprise the 16-year-old me is that I’m okay. That I manage to find simple happiness in simple things. Not always, not perfectly, but enough,” he said.