Oscar Isaac names his most over-hated movie: “It’s some of the better work I’ve done”
Oscar Isaac has been near the top of his generation’s greatest talents ever since his amazing performance in Inside Llewyn Davis showed just how nuanced he could be as an actor, and although co-starring in three Star Wars sequels ate up a significant amount of his schedule, he’s also found the time to appear in many smaller, auteur-driven projects.
It was evident from the films that Isaac signed on to that there were certain filmmakers he wanted to work with, wherein appearing in a slick neo-noir thriller like The Card Counter allowed him to play an anti-hero in a Paul Schrader movie, Suburbican introduced him to director George Clooney, and he developed a consistent working relationship with writer/director Alex Garland with both Ex Machina and Annihilation.
On paper, it seemed the logical next step that Isaac would want to work with Dan Fogler, a talented television producer and writer who had received numerous accolades for his work on This Is Us and Galavant. His film, Life Itself, appeared to be the type of old-fashioned character dramedy that the industry simply didn’t make anymore, and had assembled an impressive cast that included Olivia Cooke, Samuel L Jackson, Olivia Wilde, Mandy Patinkin, Annette Bening, Antonio Banderas, and a number of up-and-coming stars.
While Life Itself may have been made with the best of intentions, the film was met with scathing reviews when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, but even the nastiest reviews still seemed to single out Isaac as a redeeming aspect of the film. The response suggested that Fogler was simply a storyteller who was better-positioned for the small screen than he was for theatrical releases; nonetheless, Isaac told Indiewire that he hadn’t been expecting that degree of backlash.
“I was surprised that there seemed to be a full-on critical narrative to it,” he said, “It’s some of the better work that I’ve done”.
Although many of the key emotional moments in Life Itself rang false and felt inauthentic, Isaac delivered a depiction of a man coping with unimaginable grief in a way that was often quite devastating, which was because it was at a time in his life when he had recently lost his own mother and that admittedly had a tremendous impact on how he chose to characterise his role.
“I’m really proud of the places that I went and being able to sustain it, really dealing in a personal way with grief,” he said, “It was insane that I even decided to do that, considering what I was in the middle of during that moment of my life.”
Although films often debut at Toronto with the hopes of being a contender for awards, Life Itself seemed to disappear without a trace, and eventually bombed at the box office, and while it was surely a disappointment for Isaac, given what he was going through in order to turn in his performance, it didn’t prevent him from moving on to bigger and better things.
In addition to receiving some of the best reviews of his entire career for his nuanced portrayal of Victor in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, the actor is set to star in the highly anticipated second season of the Netflix anthology show Beef, making sure to stay atop that ladder of success.
