Accidental tourist

Oscar Isaac sure gets around. One minute he’s trudging of the frozen streets of early 1960s New York in

Inside Llewyn Davis, in which he played the title character.

The next, he’s in early 1960s Greece playing a young American tourist guide mixed up in a dangerous love triangle in Two Faces of January. It’s a psychological thriller from the book by Patricia Highsmith, whose works got the Hitchcock treatment in the classic Strangers on a Train and more recently

The Talented Mr Ripley and its sequel. By the time you read this — and the sidebar below — Isaac will likely be in a galaxy far, far away.

It was his startling acting — and singing — performance in the Coen Brothers’ Llewyn Davis that has given his career a tailwind.

“Yeah, without a doubt, as soon as that happened it brought many more opportunities,” Isaac says down the line as he’s ferried around London on the promotional trail for January. “It was a huge step.

“It’s good to being on the other side

Rising star Oscar Isaac talks to RUSSELL RUSSELL BAILLIE BAILLIE about going from Greenwich Village to Greece in his latest films . . . just don’t mention

a certain space epic he’s signed on for

of it. I knew from the moment I read the script what an incredible film that was going to be, because the script itself is such a good little piece of literature. They are by far the best American filmmakers working right now.”

Even without the Star Wars VII gig, it would appear that the Guatemalanborn, Miami-raised Isaac is having a moment.

“People keep telling me that. It feels like a shift has happened and there is definitely more opportunities. It’s all working out quite well.”

As his performance in Llewyn Davis indicates, Isaac was first cut out to be a musician. In high school and college he played in punk bands inspired by the Washington DC straight edge movement.

“I was a huge fan of Fugazi. I had this desire do this cover of all of the

Steady Diet of Nothing album in its entirety.”

He laughs when it’s suggested there was some common ground between the straight edge ethos and the earnestness of the folk scene of Llewyn Davis.

But as the music waned he took to acting in New York and trained at Juilliard. Soon after graduation, the film roles started to arrive for the ethnically adaptable Isaac.

That makes January is a rare movie for him. He’s playing an American, having played Timorese (he was Jose Ramos-Horta in Balibo), Hebrew (he was Joseph to Keisha Castle Hughes’ Mary in The Nativity Story) and Olde English (he was Prince John to Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood).

And he’s not hiding out behind a beard. Clean shaven and in period clothes, here Isaac’s Rydal resembles a young Al Pacino.

He stars alongside Viggo Mortensen and Kirsten Dunst who play a holidaying American couple he helps escape Athens after a run-in with a private detective who has been tailing the pair.

Hiding out in Crete, Rydal takes a shine to Dunst’s Colette while Mortensen’s Chester broods and boozes.

The directing debut by Hossein Amini, whose writing credits includes

Drive, in which Isaac appeared, January treads similar territory to Ripley.

Isaac went back and looked at the 1999 Anthony Minghella film as well as Highsmith’s original novel.

“It was definitely helpful to go look at the book to see what Hossein had changed and why and just get a scenes of the whole tone of it, just because the nature of the book is so different. The character I play is so passive and innocent in the book and so the fact is that Hossein came up with great ways of dramatising conflicts he was having.’’

“It’s a classic film noir —a psychological thriller in the truest sense of the word, with these people in a love triangle where the power shifts, particularly between these two men, shot against this beautiful backdrop.

“They don’t really make movies like this often where it is really about the just the story and dynamics between these characters and doing them in the actual places they are set.”