Oscar Isaac Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

jay-j wanted to meet me, we met in a cafe in the city and I remember sitting reading the new Star Wars movie on his iPhone while he was sitting in front of millions of cafes in Paris, it was incredibly surreal and dry, yeah that's it . He was with Nick as a referee and we wanted to say that he didn't have a host star. I went to that restaurant there and I was actually going to tell him that I wasn't going to do the movie when I read the script. I remember feeling like the standard character was standard when he said well, if it could be anything you wanted, what would it be, what would it be if you could just because make it up and then we sat there for four hours.

I remember at this restaurant and we just walked by and he came up with all these ideas of, well, what if he owned his own bar and he, you know, decided with me that he made a mistake because he kept some money that he didn't should have and now he's in jail and now he has things that he has to pay for protection and little by little all of this is getting out of his control and I think ultimately it made the situation much more complex because suddenly you felt a little bit for the guy, and once he gets out of prison, you know, suddenly, this triangle becomes a lot more complex, he says you've been helping a lot, okay mm-hmm, that's very nice, listen, I see, thank you.

I also remember the beginning, only Nicolas F&E would do it. He always wears a blanket around his abdomen because that's where he kept the warm energy that was Nick Raffinate and now I can't have this with me all the time because he says it's like, you know, every time it says in the script that the guy appears. the door, I wonder why he doesn't come in through the window or go up the floor, go through a wall and go through all the different options of what he isn't and then come back to why he is. be this and that's something that I've always kept with me that idea of ​​well, what else could be inside Llewyn Davis?

That was the kind of thing that changed everything. I remember he was making a movie in Pittsburgh. and I was pretty bored so I started playing the guitar a lot. I had always played guitar but this time I really took it a lot more seriously and started finding open mics in the area and went and played and then a few months later I got this audition for the Coen Brothers where I got to play some songs. Oh, everything that happened to get to this role was just as crazy as when I was doing this other movie after knowing that.

I had the audition coming up and there was this guy who was a featured extra, he's an older guy, at the end of the bar and there was a guitar lying around and he picked it up and started playing it in exactly this style, Travis was playing. and he was amazing he was so good he looks like Eric France and I said hi you're amazing yeah you play a lot like oh yeah I've been playing my whole life you give lessons yeah actually you give lessons all the time and said. oh, because I'm auditioning for this thing that's based on Dave Van Ronk because you know Dave Van Ronk, he's like, yeah, I played with Dave and it gives me chills.

I need to learn to play, can you, yeah, yeah, so I'm coming. to his house and lives right above the old Gaslight. He's been there for years and it seemed like a time capsule that we had with all those old guitars everywhere on the records and he would just play record after record and teach me how to play. this Travis ping this is just for the audition you know I haven't even gotten the part yet then I got it and it was the

most

amazing experience of my life they're great I don't see a lot of money here you know?

Jonathan, they always operate from this place where whoever feels the strongest wins, someone feels very strongly that that shouldn't be the shot, they'll always be a guy that says no, it definitely shouldn't be that the other guy, him, is. good. great and every once in a while he would probably show up and you know, Joel would come give me an address and he would leave and then he thought he would come and give me an address, sometimes it was a different address so he would just do what the Last Guy He said this whole thing was like the greatest education I could ever give him, so generous with his knowledge and at the same time he didn't give any compliments, so that really taught me to stay within myself. and not look for anything from them because every time they showed up, you know it's like it was good, they just came and went, yeah, yeah, you know, and then if it wasn't good, they left, yeah, yeah, I got it, I have it.

Do It Again, The Most Violent Year which was particularly cool because it was right down the street from where I live, where we were mainly filming, so I could walk to work every morning. It was also the coldest winter in years and years, as you know below. that big camel coat and those, you know, perfect Armani suits that I wore, you know, a nude scuba suit to keep me warm and that was really cool, especially because of Jessica Chastain, who I went to school with and we went to school together. Julliard and she is the one who can really defend me for the role, you know, I remember he was like a very, you know, elegant guy, very well built and at that time I was finishing filming ex machina and when I met with JC I had shaved head and a huge beard and he said: I don't know if this is the guy.

What is he? He is a weapon. It's a weapon. There's so much ambiguity in it that I really loved it. You know it was It was a gangster movie, but without the gangsters, you know, it was about violence, but without violence, it was really challenging to play because everything was so close to the vest, everything there was just kind of an internal volcano that was going on. brewing inside. I really rarely had a moment to hang out, but doing those scenes with Jessica was a lot of fun because we were very similar animals ex machina. One of the first auditions I had when I graduated from school was for a movie called Sunshine. that Alex Garland had written and I remember reading the script and I became so obsessed with it after I didn't get the part that I still went back and read it and I had all these ideas for the music and I remember thinking like this There's a way to give them my ideas to these people because I have some really great ideas about this, but that's the impression the script made.

Years later, he was officially directing his first film. I walked into this hotel. to meet him, I remember when I was walking in I saw several actors leaving, so it was like that speed dating thing I was doing, huh, and there was like, oh, hello, yeah, big fan, and then I was going to go talk to him him, we sat down and I immediately started talking about sunlight. I'm also a bit of a nerd, so you know, I thought a lot about consciousness and what consciousness means and particularly in terms of artificial intelligence and we just sat down. for a few hours and I just talked and talked about all the possibilities and how do you know how you would play a character like this and the fact that within the movie itself this guy is playing a role that has to play someone who is a very specific. so that the experiment turns out the way he wants, but at the same time you know that he goes a little with the method and goes so deep that, at a certain point, you know what the role is. he's playing where he really is because he's not he's a nihilist he knows the singularity is coming it's going to be the end for us it's just a matter of one and if it's not him someone else is going to solve this Ava, I said enough and then I forgot exactly why I took this path, but I thought a lot about Stanley Kubrick, someone there is also quite mysterious, genius and brilliant, so I listened to him over and over again recording an interview of him.

It was kind of late '50s and there's something about his voice that I really liked, so I started trying to play with that voice and I actually used the same kind of glass that he had, so for me it was really Kubrick. and then a lot with my dad, but as a doctor, and he's an incredibly smart guy, but he also has a weird spiritual aspect to him, it's weird, my dad came to visit and there's a really cool photo of him and me playing. chess in the game in the corner and he has a beard and glasses and I don't have a shaved head, but those were the two people I really thought of Star Wars The Force Awakens I was going through a very violent year and I found out that JJ He wanted to meet me for a role and he needed to fly to Paris and I remember that I actually still have the voice message saved because I remember while I was recording that type of message from an unknown person and it was a voice like Hi Oscar, it's JJ.

You know you don't have to come all the way to Paris. What are you going to get? What are you going to do? You will play a droid. You don't have to do it. This is actually Albert Brooks, like Albert was in the movies. So you really let me entertain you for a second and I'm very happy that I still have that voicemail, but yeah, so I ended up going to Paris and I met with him, Cathy Kennedy and Lawrence Kasdan and we sat in the office and they told me the story. story is like that we're all like guys in first person he's on the crawl you know they describe him he's Leia as the number one pilot and he shows up and you have a scene with Max von Sydow and then the main villain shows up and then you die spectacularly.

I was like, oh, I've just done it so many times that you know you set up the main story for the main

characters

, you know, and then Cathy, to her credit, says, yeah, you. I did that for us in the Bourne movie Bourne. I thought so and I thought, but let me think about it and then I went home and thought about it. I thought, "You know what I have to do." and then when I called him to let him know I wanted to do it, he said we're actually changing it, he's in the whole movie, now it's going to be great, you completed my mission, Finn, that's my jacket, oh no, no, stay with she.

You and I flew to London and I read it with John Boyega, that was the first time I met him and the next day we were doing the reading where we were all sitting in a circle and reading the new Star Wars movie star. wars, the last jedi for the force awakens, uh, you know, it was such a new thing, it was an incredibly huge moment, so there was a very intense energy, I was excited, but there was just a vibe to everything. You know, and there was a whole thing that was so thought out and so orchestrated because it meant a lot in the second, you know, Ryan came in, it was very relaxed.

I always described him as a West Coast jazz musician, you know, kind of. Loop is really cool and he's very calm, soft-spoken and humble, and I feel like he's a kid. I wonder about the whole thing and, for me, you know, I got to work with Laura Dern, who's one of my favorites, and stuff. It was a fun thing to do and also challenging, so yes, it had a very different energy, but yes, I really liked Ryan's apocalypse a lot, it was unbearable. I didn't know when I said yes. That's what was going to happen I was going to be wrapped in glue and latex and in a 40 pound suit I had to wear a cooling mechanism at all times I couldn't really move my head you never know what I was in I get to work with these great actors which I really like, but I couldn't even see them because I couldn't move my head and I had to sit in a specially designed chair because that was the only thing I could do.

I would actually sit down and be put in a cooling tent between takes, so I would never talk to anyone and just sit there. I couldn't really move and I liked sweating inside. the mask and helmet didn't answer them, I'm happy and then I was also in high heels inside a boot so it was very difficult to move and every time I moved it was like the rubbers and plastic were squeaking so everything what did I say I also had to dub it later and then take it out was the worst part because they just had to scrape it for hours and hours so it was the annihilation of the X-Men apocalypse, it was a crazy experience because I was filming it for the last time.

Jedi at exactly the same time and on the same lot in Pinewood, so I was going back and forth while making Star Wars in that really intense dark world and that had a reason why there are a lot of found footage elements. that was also very loose, so we would just play with what it was and a lot of times it would be Alex who was operating the video camera or a flashlight and to actually get in there, that particular scene was quite surprising because they had You know, they actually made it practical, there was as a practical effect, they made this torso for the guy on the flap that opens and there was someone behind them pulling everything, like the intestines and stuff, and I remember thinking about my father again but and everywhere because afterward even He pointed out that there was like a pain of opening someone up and seeing something that you know made them more horrible rather than me being a little horrified by it.

I was like up there. Yeah, you know, there was an emotion to it that made it even more disturbing, so that's something Alex talked about a lot in that movie. It's like making what's there a little bit out of place, so it really scares you. Yeah, that was, uh, it was kind of dark, but I loved it.movie