Oscar Isaac
is an unlikely but effective supervillain in “X-Men: Apocalypse.”
If you were casting a supervillain in a comic book movie, odds are Oscar Isaac wouldn’t be the first person you’d think of. Until he broke out to worldwide fame last year in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” as ace pilot Poe Dameron, Isaac was best known for his work in heady, small-scale fare like “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “A Most Violent Year” and “Ex Machina.”
But when director Bryan Singer approached Isaac about taking on the role of an ancient, allpowerful mutant in “XMen: Apocalypse,” the actor jumped at the chance. Speaking by phone recently from Britain, where he is shooting “Star Wars: Episode VIII,” Isaac, 37, talked through how he got into the proper head space to play a fearsome baddie bent on global destruction. This is an edited transcript.
Q: When Bryan Singer first came to you about playing the newest XMen villain, what did you hook into about the idea?
A: It was definitely a leap of faith because there wasn’t a script yet. But I was interested in not only the comic part of it but the actual biblical inspiration. (Comic book writer) Louise Simonson, who came up with Apocalypse originally, used all this imagery from the Book of Revelation, like the Four Horsemen.
For me, having grown up with a lot of these things, I had kind of gotten obsessed with the Book of Revelation because it was so hallucinogenic and trippy and scary. I thought it would be fun to really go into that language.
One of the things I found researching was that the word “apocalypse” doesn’t actually mean “destruction” or “the end of the world”; it means “to reveal, to lift back the curtain.” So that’s something that we ended up using in the script a lot, that Apocalypse was going to reveal the true strength of everyone, particularly his Horsemen — whether Storm is actually a true goddess, or Magneto has only used a little bit of what he’s capable of.
Q: Bryan said you two would trade certain songs back and forth for inspiration of how to approach the character.
A: Yeah, “When the Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash was the first. “Boy in the Bubble” by Paul Simon was another great one. That was a fun way to get into the tone of the guy.
From a performance standpoint, it was anything but naturalistic; it was closer to kabuki and Greek theater. What is a being that can transfer his consciousness through the ages? How does he behave? How does he speak? It was fun to explore how wild we could go with that.
Q: How long a process was it to get into the suit and the makeup?
A: At first it was a few hours, but the team I had was so good that by the end we were down to maybe an hour. It was like a pit crew. The suit weighed about 40 pounds, and it had a cooling mechanism underneath it because otherwise I’d die of heatstroke. Meditation became very important because sometimes I’d be sweating into my ears, and I couldn’t reach them because of all the makeup. I just had to Zen out a little bit.
The fact that we didn’t go with a full CG thing, that I actually got to wear that suit and put on that makeup and try to express through that, as challenging as it was, hopefully what it does is it creates something specific and idiosyncratic.