Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac
Oscar Isaac is a Guatemalan American actor and musician. He is known for his lead film roles in the comedy-drama Inside Llewyn Davis, for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination, the crime drama A Most Violent Yearand the science fiction thriller Ex Machina. In 2006 he portrayed Joseph, husband of Mary, in The Nativity Story. He also portrayed José Ramos-Horta, former president of East Timor, in the Australian film Balibo for which he won the AACTA Award for...
NationalityGuatemalan
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth9 March 1979
CountryGuatemala
I was in bands, but they were punk bands, and you plug in the guitars, you turn them up really loud, you've got four or five other people on stage with you, you've got some protection from when they throw lighters. You can always hide behind the lead singer or the bass player.
I was never much of a singer. I was terrible. It's embarrassing: I was trying to sound like everybody else. I went through a big Cure phase, so I was trying to do that kind of dramatic voice.
Being someone with Latin roots, so many doors are constantly closed for you because people put you in a category, and the thing I've always wanted to avoid is categorisation.
Every frame of a Coen brothers movie is filled with history and meaning, and the deeper you go, the deeper you get. That's why their movies stand up particularly well to repeated viewing and investigation.
I actually started playing in little cafes around New York, and I have a lot of good friends of mine who are musicians who are struggling in New York.
I don't know why people are so obsessed with finding out stuff before the movie comes out. It's so much more fun to just go. I mean, I don't do that. I don't go looking for stuff that I'm interested in, you know, to try and find out pictures and what the movie's about. It's so much more fun to be surprised.
I have been playing acoustic music for a very long time, and it's something that I am very comfortable doing, so if I made a record, it would probably be a mixture of that and some other things that I'm interested in.
I really just like characters who you don't know where they stand for a long while. It's like people. You hang out with them for 10 years, and then all of a sudden they do something, and you say, 'Who are you?' That's more interesting. In life and on-screen.
I'm really sick of anthems. Every song has to be a very big singalong thing - it feels very Eighties. There are a lot of 'whoah whoa whoahs,' this stadium thing. You're even getting that from some of the 'folk' groups. I can't stand it.
In a play, you dictate pace, you dictate rhythm, you dictate when people look at you, when people should be looking at something else. In film, the editor does that.
It'd be crazy to say just because an artist is not successful that means he's not talented. I don't think anybody really believes that, but sometimes it feels that way.
Most actors, if you ask them if they play guitar, they'll say they played guitar for 20 years, but what they really mean is they've owned a guitar for 20 years.
The songs I've written that are the strongest, I'm like: 'I don't know where that came from. It just kind of popped out.' You feel you can't take a whole lot of credit for it. I didn't purposefully will it into existence.
The very first proper play I did was 'Godspell,' and I played the guitar for it, and I had a small part in a high school play. And before that, in sixth grade, I wrote a musical about Noah's ark.