Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac is a Guatemalan American actor and musician. He is known for his lead film roles in the comedy-drama Inside Llewyn Davis, for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination, the crime drama A Most Violent Yearand the science fiction thriller Ex Machina. In 2006 he portrayed Joseph, husband of Mary, in The Nativity Story. He also portrayed José Ramos-Horta, former president of East Timor, in the Australian film Balibo for which he won the AACTA Award for...
NationalityGuatemalan
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth9 March 1979
CountryGuatemala
I like films that take their time a little bit more and don't show you all of their cards right away, characters that are conflicted and contradicting and seem one way at first and then suddenly turn out to be something else.
I have been playing acoustic music for a very long time, and it's something that I am very comfortable doing, so if I made a record, it would probably be a mixture of that and some other things that I'm interested in.
What's funny in 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street' is how Dave Van Ronk talks a lot about the time and how exciting it was and how electric it was.
My dad always played a lot of music, so I heard him playing all the time, and then I decided that I wanted to learn to play guitar, so I got an acoustic and started taking lessons. I wanted to be able to shred like Yngwie Malmsteen.
I remember the first time my mind was blown by an actor was Tim Curry, because I loved 'Clue' when I was a kid, and then I was watching the movie 'Legend,' and the Devil suddenly smiles, and I was like, 'It's the same guy!' It was a total Keyser Soeze moment.
That first play I did in New York, Rogelio Martinez's 'When It's Cocktail Time in Cuba,' I played a young Fidel Castro.
What you wear can be such an indicator of so many things. You know, how you feel, how you want others to perceive you. So, that is an absolutely essential part of building a character.
There's very few geniuses that come and revolutionize everything. For the rest of us that want to be artists and have something to say, it's a lot of work and a lot of luck.
The very first proper play I did was 'Godspell,' and I played the guitar for it, and I had a small part in a high school play. And before that, in sixth grade, I wrote a musical about Noah's ark.
The songs I've written that are the strongest, I'm like: 'I don't know where that came from. It just kind of popped out.' You feel you can't take a whole lot of credit for it. I didn't purposefully will it into existence.
Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they'll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they've owned a guitar for 20 years.
It'd be crazy to say just because an artist is not successful that means he's not talented. I don't think anybody really believes that, but sometimes it feels that way.
In a play, you dictate pace, you dictate rhythm, you dictate when people look at you, when people should be looking at something else. In film, the editor does that.
I'm really sick of anthems. Every song has to be a very big singalong thing - it feels very Eighties. There are a lot of 'whoah whoa whoahs,' this stadium thing. You're even getting that from some of the 'folk' groups. I can't stand it.