OSCAR ISAAC

HAS THE MOON IN HIS SIGHTS…

…is about to go full Moon for the MCU. Not like that.

I’ve been called many things over many lifetimes,” said Oscar Isaac in his last encounter with the Marvel universe. Five years after he terrorised the world as the villain of many names (but mostly the titular one) in X-Men: Apocalypse, Isaac seems set to assume more identities for his Marvel reunion.

Isaac has been tipped by Variety to play Marc Spector in Marvel Studios’ TV show Moon Knight, based on the comics about a mercenary with multiple personality disorder who is granted superpowers by the Moon god Khonshu. While Spector wore the personas of cab drivers and millionaires in early iterations, his personalities later included SpiderMan, Wolverine or Captain America. And it’s no small credit to Isaac that you can easily imagine him playing all of them.

Whether or not his always on-the-move childhood stood him in good stead for this fluency as an actor, Isaac has certainly put in the groundwork. Diverse bit-parts in his early output took him from Che to Robin Hood, Drive, Agora and beyond, before he headlined the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis as a folkie struggling to turn soul into success.

Llewyn’s failure was Isaac’s ticket to multi-faceted fame. While his character work in The Two Faces Of January and A Most Violent Year drew praise, he brought a leading man’s wry charm and an ensemble player’s generosity to a certain Poe Dameron. Elsewhere, Isaac’s hipster-techie in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina proved him equally at home on sci-fi’s darker indie fringes and the dancefloor: numerous gifs paid due tribute to his twinkle-toed talents.

In an interview about Paul Schrader’s incoming drama The Card Counter, Isaac told Deadline he was veering away from franchise material. But Apocalypse reflected his childhood love of the comics villain, and he will soon face sandworms in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. He also enjoyed the experience of “doing a six-hour movie in two-anda-half or three months” for HBO’s Show Me A Hero (Scenes From A Marriage is on his TV slate, too), so a lead in Marvel’s growing Disney+ empire looks like a case of multiple stars aligning. No doubt about it, Isaac has the moves for it.

ETA | 1 OCTOBER 2021 / DUNE RELEASES IN CINEMAS NEXT YEAR; THE CARD COUNTER AND MOON KNIGHT ARE TBC.