It is possible to be young and old at once. To be filled with both a child’s confusion and adult terror—and to still have room for some other wordless, ancient fear to thread itself through you and disrupt the sleep that comes at night, even years later. The hurricane will leave a trail of destruction behind, and though Oscar and his family will make it out alive, some things will not survive intact, like his parents’ marriage. Something else intangible will come untethered in his life. There is nothing certain anymore. There is no such thing as solid ground. And while it might not be free fall, the boy senses a shift in the balance of the world: The security that (if we’re lucky) childhood provides is gone.
He had a small desk, full of pages of the stories he had written. All of them were lost to the storm, to the encroaching sea.
As the years progress, as a burgeoning interest in music and film opens pathways and brings him great acclaim, certain uneasy dreams still persist: of the house, of walking through it, of remembering it and yearning for the promises it held.
THE FIRST APARTMENT
“I’ve always felt like an outsider,” Isaac says. He is talking about the characters he feels drawn to as an actor—how they, too, are often outsiders, people grappling with their place in their world. The sun, bright and unusually warm for the time of year, spills through the window behind him. He is in the Brooklyn apartment he bought back when he felt he had made it and that he keeps for visiting family and friends. He is wearing an orange tie-dyed T-shirt and dark sweats, and he sits cross-legged on his bright-yellow sofa, drinking a glass of water. His curly hair is casually finger-combed off his forehead, his dark eyes warm. “Literally, and then emotionally, psychologically. I always felt like I was observing life and not actually experiencing it. There was a lot of guilt with that sometimes—feeling like I was a vulture of my own life.”
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zC0VepG2RAM" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
To be in conversation with Oscar Isaac, who is forty-three, is to talk with someone who has thought deeply about the course of his life—not out of narcissism or vanity but by necessity, a desperate desire to find what feels like solid ground. For him. For his family. For us, whom his art reaches. He has worked to wrest meaning out of his confusions and fears. His effort is ongoing, and his audiences have the privilege of following him in his relentless and shattering performances, in search of the firm footing he lost every time another of his dreams was interrupted.
Forty-two movies in, where has he led us?
Two nights ago, he hosted Saturday Night Live, his first time. The gig was part of the buildup to his next big project, Moon Knight, his triumphant induction into the vaunted Marvel universe.
But everyone knew Oscar Isaac already, of course. As the wisecracking, brusque Poe Dameron in the three most recent Star Wars movies; as the unsettling, reclusive tech overlord in Ex Machina; as the desperate businessman in A Most Violent Year; as the devastated husband in Scenes from a Marriage. From Dune; from The Card Counter, a recent thriller by Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver; from the anguished melancholy of the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Isaac is riveting onscreen, at ease with ambiguity, comfortable maneuvering in that unsteady space where there is no correct response, no right answers, but what exists might be something akin to a greater truth.
.png)
