Oscar Isaac aces it as ‘Jedi’ pilot

Oscar Isaac’s character in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” just wants to blow things up.

That certainly applies to stuff belonging to the First Order, the military faction that Resistance ace fighter pilot Poe Dameron — played by Isaac — has dedicated his life to bringing down.

But after his pivotal role in destroying the First Order’s super weapon, Starkiller Base, in the previous chapter of the “Star Wars” saga, Dameron’s maverick ways have now put him at odds with his superiors, including the late Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia — and put the ace flyboy into a deep dive of a personal crisis.

Isaac says writer-director Rian Johnson’s turn at the helm of “The Last Jedi,” opening Dec. 15, has yielded an especially emotional chapter in the epic space drama.

“What Rian has done is figure out what is the most challenging thing (a character) could be faced with,” Isaac, 38, tells Viva.

“In Poe’s case, he said, ‘What is Poe the best at? What does Poe know how to do? He knows how to fly and to fight and to attack, regardless of the odds. So what happens if that’s taken away from him? He doesn’t have the ability to do the one thing he knows how to do. What happens to him?’

“And so this is the situation we find him in.”

Unlike Poe, Isaac has been in a pretty good situation lately that goes beyond his massive “Star Wars” exposure. Born Oscar Isaac Hernandez in Guatemala to a Guatemalan mother and Cuban father and raised in Miami, he came to New York to study acting at Juilliard in the early 2000s. He impressed critics early on with his intensity and presence in supporting roles in the likes of “Body of Lies” and “Sucker Punch,” then broke through as a struggling ’60s folk singer in the 2013 Coen Brothers film “Inside Llewyn Davis.” He followed that up in the neo-noirish “A Most Violent Year” and as a real-life, tragic Yonkers politician in HBO’s “Show Me a Hero.” It’s been the ability to immerse himself in a variety of quirky, offbeat characters that enabled him to avoid being typecast due to his Latin American background. “Really, it’s the choices that you make,” says Isaac, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and 7-month-old son. “What’s important about an actor is not their representational qualities. It’s the power of this individual to transform (his) soul and to relate something to someone else, regardless of culture. “At the same time,” he adds, “it’s been letting everyone know that I am a Latino, that I’m proud to be a Latino. But as an actor, one of the things to know is that we are capable of more than what someone’s idea of a Latino is.”