11 Things We Learned Hanging With Oscar Isaac
No actor had a better 2015 than Oscar Isaac. He found a hilariously unsettling take on an eccentric tech billionaire (with serious dance chops) in Ex Machina; embodied the real-life tragedy of a Yonkers politician in his Golden Globe-winning turn in David Simon’s Show Me a Hero; and spent quality time with BB-8 and Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now, he’s the titular blue-skinned villain in X-Men: Apocalypse, which landed him on the cover of Rolling Stone, accompanied with his dog, Moby. Here’s more from interviews for his cover story.
Poe Dameron is the most straightforward part Isaac has ever played – and maybe the most difficult
“It’s extra-challenging when there’s less characterization involved,” he says. “I mean, there’s still quite a bit of character there — he’s not me, even the way of talking is a bit different. But sometimes it’s hard when you have less to hold on to. Have you ever seen this movie called The Five Obstructions by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth? He has remake a film five different times, each with a different ‘obstruction,’ like it has to be animated. But the final obstruction was no obstruction at all, and that was the most difficult. That’s a little bit of how I felt. If I have every choice possible, then I don’t know what to do. I have no way of focusing it!”
To prepare for X-Men, he studied cults like the Source Family and re-read the Book of Revelation — and his musings about Apocalypse got pretty deep
“We were talking about, what if he’s the only person that actually has a soul? Out of all of us, he’s the only one that’s been able to separate his consciousness from his body, which is something that pretty much every religion aspires to. And maybe he would feel that he is the steward of humanity’s consciousness. So he’s been shaping us, but then he gets betrayed and he’s buried for a long time — and then wakes. The main idea is to imagine that God has been asleep, and He wakes up tomorrow and he’s like, ‘No, this wasn’t supposed to be it.’ And he’s pissed.”
Isaac spent most of a recent week off from the next Star Wars playing video games
“I played a lot of Street Fighter on PS4. I’m really good, man. It just came out, this brand new Street Fighter 5. And I was playing The Witness – figuring out them puzzles.”
He has no interest in getting super-jacked for a role
“I had to get kind of big for Ex Machina,” he says. “But you know, this whole new thing where dudes just get fucking bulked out — I think I’ve passed that point. Maybe in my 20s or early 30s I would’ve found that appealing. I got really slim for Apocalypse. I was on a very intense regimen then. But everyone’s starting to look the same. I get the aesthetic, though: If you look at the drawings in comic books and video games and all that, there is a mythological element to those characters, so part of that is the body and seeing all the sculpted muscles and stuff.”
He didn’t know he would be wearing a giant suit and make-up when he signed on to play Apocalypse
“I would’ve thought it would’ve been an animated character or some sort of CGI thing,” he says. “It’s a crazy gamble. When [X-Men director Bryan Singer] was like, ‘I want to do it as practical as possible,’ I thought, OK, that’s a really interesting challenge.”
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