The Oscar Isaac performance that left everybody baffled: “They didn’t know what the hell I was doing”
Oscar Isaac has been one of the lynchpins of several major big-screen franchises over the last ten years or so, from playing Poe Dameron in JJ Abrams’ Star Wars trilogy to a major role in X Men: Apocalypse to the Duke Leto Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune.
Basically, if you’re a director with a big budget to have fun with, you give Oscar a call.
But when Marvel did exactly that with their limited series called Moon Knight a few years back, Isaac very nearly didn’t take the lead role on – for one he was exhausted from doing special effects fare like in Star Wars, and two he had ideas on how to play the main character with split personalities that he didn’t think anyone would remotely agree with.
When the Marvel universe came to Isaac with the project, he hadn’t long wrapped on the three Jedi movies and felt he wanted to do more “character studies”, which require much shorter shoots and smaller budgets. With regard to Moon Knight, he told the Radio Times: “It was months of smashing my head against a stone wall like, ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ I thought, ‘I shouldn’t do it. Maybe maybe…’
There was also the fact that Isaac’s feeling for the ‘Steven Grant’ character, the more reserved personality compared to the former marine of ‘Marc Spector’, was to do it as a kind of hapless British nerd, which he didn’t think would resonate with the audience, let alone the producers.
But he did the character for his family at home, who liked it, and so decided to press ahead and had a meeting with Marvel supremo Kevin Feige at which he showed him what he wanted to do on Moon Knight. He added: “It’s funny, because afterwards he told me they didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And they weren’t sure it was going to work at all. But you know, in the end I’m glad we did that, because everyone says it kind of makes the show.”
In the end, Moon Knight was a moderate hit when it streamed on Disney+ back in 2022 over a six-episode run. Critics weren’t overly sure about it, but audiences enjoyed it enough that over the last few years demand has increased to see a Season Two, although at this point it seems unlikely, and there are no concrete plans in place.
Isaac is expected to return as the ‘Lunar Legionnaire’; however, it is much more likely to be part of a wider Marvel Universe movie. That could well be the long-rumoured Midnight Suns film, which would bring together several characters, including Blade, Doctor Strange and Moon Knight himself.
Isaac, meanwhile, is about to hit Netflix in a big way as part of Guillermo del Toro’s monster flick Frankenstein, with Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth. The movie lands on the streaming site on November 7th and has a fair bit of hype attached to it after initial screenings.
Isaac is also busy working on a movie adaptation of the classic video game Metal Gear Solid, as well as another horror movie that is getting a lot of attention, Flesh of the Gods, with Elizabeth Olsen and Kristen Stewart, a vampire film set in 1980s Los Angeles.
