Oscar Isaac Talks Annihilation, Star Wars, and the Most Turbulent Year of His Life
What would it look like if, in 2018, the most talented actor in all of Hollywood actually lived in New York City to be near the theater, avoided social media, and had zero interest in growing his personal brand? Well, he’d be poised to have one hell of an interesting career. Here, Zach Baron talks it out with the man himself: Oscar Isaac.
Oscar Isaac slips unnoticed through his neighborhood of the past several years, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on a gray January afternoon. He's been in New York long enough to know how to avoid drawing strangers' attention; he's also just naturally gifted at hiding when he needs to hide, whether on-screen or off. When he takes a part, he tends to disappear in it. Already, his catalog of doomed, slightly abrasive idealists—whether in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis; the tech sociopath he played in Alex Garland's Ex Machina; or as a quixotic, ill-fated mayor in the Paul Haggis–directed HBO series Show Me a Hero—is one of the most surprising and vivid early bodies of work we have going in movies today. He's the rare actor who seems totally indifferent to whether or not he is loved. So of course people love him.
He's found success as a leading man only recently, but in a way that seems impossible to replicate; he's done it, improbably, as an actor, rather than as a brand, or as a fun talk-show presence, or just as a handsome face that cameras happen to have an easy time with. (Up close, he is in fact handsome, but in what I'll describe as an entirely non-Hollywood way—a fortuitous assemblage of the right imperfections.)
In the past year, Isaac had a small part in George Clooney's Suburbicon and a large part in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which he's just finished promoting. In March, he'll star in Annihilation, Garland's second film. Isaac plays a military man and husband to Natalie Portman, and spends most of the movie shirtless and in fatigues, exploring the limits of his own sanity. It's a Technicolor nightmare of a film, and Isaac, characteristically, feels right at home in it.
What would it look like if, in 2018, the most talented actor in all of Hollywood actually lived in New York City to be near the theater, avoided social media, and had zero interest in growing his personal brand? Well, he’d be poised to have one hell of an interesting career. Here, Zach Baron talks it out with the man himself: Oscar Isaac.
Oscar Isaac slips unnoticed through his neighborhood of the past several years, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on a gray January afternoon. He's been in New York long enough to know how to avoid drawing strangers' attention; he's also just naturally gifted at hiding when he needs to hide, whether on-screen or off. When he takes a part, he tends to disappear in it. Already, his catalog of doomed, slightly abrasive idealists—whether in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis; the tech sociopath he played in Alex Garland's Ex Machina; or as a quixotic, ill-fated mayor in the Paul Haggis–directed HBO series Show Me a Hero—is one of the most surprising and vivid early bodies of work we have going in movies today. He's the rare actor who seems totally indifferent to whether or not he is loved. So of course people love him.
He's found success as a leading man only recently, but in a way that seems impossible to replicate; he's done it, improbably, as an actor, rather than as a brand, or as a fun talk-show presence, or just as a handsome face that cameras happen to have an easy time with. (Up close, he is in fact handsome, but in what I'll describe as an entirely non-Hollywood way—a fortuitous assemblage of the right imperfections.)
In the past year, Isaac had a small part in George Clooney's Suburbicon and a large part in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which he's just finished promoting. In March, he'll star in Annihilation, Garland's second film. Isaac plays a military man and husband to Natalie Portman, and spends most of the movie shirtless and in fatigues, exploring the limits of his own sanity. It's a Technicolor nightmare of a film, and Isaac, characteristically, feels right at home in it.
