Oscar Isaac: The Internet’s Boyfriend Becomes a Leading Man
Oscar Isaac shuts his eyes tight, guitar in hand, and the world goes away. Which is convenient, because the world keeps presenting him with unwelcome facts, here in his 37th year: Turns out that if you’re a dreamily handsome actor who delivers fierce, incandescent, once-in-a-generation performances worthy of Pacino and De Niro, and then takes big roles in Star Wars and X-Men movies, you will become famous, and people will start calling you a movie star. Who knew? “I’m an actor, not a star,” he’ll say, bristling politely, if probed too hard on the subject of his rise. “I don’t really know what you mean when you say ‘star,’ ‘movie star,’ that stuff.”
Isaac never planned for any of this – never planned for much of anything, really – and he’s trying to keep it all out of his head. He’s obsessed with craft, indifferent to celebrity, private by instinct. The money is nice, not that he’s spending much of it, but the only part of success he truly covets is having his pick of roles. He’s bemused by the fervent female fan base he’s acquired, with bloggers calling him “the Internet’s boyfriend.” “The Internet never struck me as being into monogamous relationships,” he says with a small laugh. “It’s very promiscuous, the Internet.” (The Internet almost dumped him last year when an old picture emerged of him wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the cover of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. “I liked the design,” he says. “I didn’t think wearing the shirt was saying I agreed with all her politics. I’m not a libertarian!”)
Isaac still lives in the same one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he bought before his career’s recent uptick. He doesn’t own a car (“You know how much a garage is? It’s like paying rent!”). He did at least renovate his Brooklyn place, and purchased homes for his mom and sister. He’ll consider a larger apartment if he has kids, or, as he puts it, “if I duplicate or replicate.”
He doesn’t want his life to change, and certainly doesn’t want to be trapped in dull leading-man parts. He was unnerved when the director Paul Schrader told him, of one prospective role, “You’re going to be the lead, you’re going to have to show up and let day players twirl around you, doing all sorts of interesting stuff, and you’ve just got to listen and be present.” That’s not what De Niro did in “Taxi Driver,” he thought.
Now, on a Thursday afternoon in April, during a rare sojourn home from the London shoot of the follow-up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Isaac is doing exactly what he’d be doing if none of his success had happened: jamming with friends in a Brooklyn rehearsal space not far from his apartment. “We’re just fooling around,” he claims, but he’s blissed out, transported, as he plays. He’s wearing a thin white T-shirt, loose at the neck, which, combined with his ropy physique, dark good looks, and the sideburns he’s grown for his Star Wars part as Poe Dameron, gives him a distinct Springsteen-in-’78 vibe. (He doesn’t deny that he’d be good casting for a Bruce biopic, but adds, “Wouldn’t you rather just see Springsteen for real?”)
When Isaac enrolled in Juilliard in 2001, he left behind a promising, if already deeply out-of-fashion, Florida ska-punk band. He hadn’t decided between music and acting: His talents for the former were key to winning the most important role of his career, as an amusingly dolorous Sixties folk singer in the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, which took him, at age 35, from eternally promising second-stringer to one of the most in-demand actors in the world. (His essential lessons from the Coens: the unimportance of careerism and the virtues of “just getting on with it.”)
Isaac strums a D chord on an acoustic guitar, eyes still shut, losing himself in “Devotion,” a song he wrote six months ago. He was, at the time, in Montreal, filming his X-Men: Apocalypse role as nearly all-powerful mutant Apocalypse, a performance that director Bryan Singer calibrated by asking for “quarter Skeletor,” “half Skeletor” or “full Skeletor.” Needless to say, “You can fire your arrows from the Tower of Babel, but you can never strike God!” called for full Skeletor.