Oscar Isaac’s gut was telling him: “No.”
Back in 2020, when the call came in to see if he might be interested in playing a little-known, ultraviolent comic-book character named Moon Knight, something didn’t sit right. “My initial thing was, ‘No, I don’t want to go back into that kind of machinery,’” Isaac tells Empire. “I did that already. The last thing I want is to be on a massive set, [thinking], ‘What am I doing here?’”
A lifelong Marvel fan, Isaac had played the X-Men villain Apocalypse in 2016, but it wasn’t an overtly pleasurable time — due largely to the “walking sarcophagus” of glue and latex he had to don every day. Plus, he’d just spent five (more pleasurable) years as Poe Dameron in Star Wars. After all that, he was ready to take a blockbuster sabbatical. “Often on these big movies it can feel like you’re building the plane on the runway,” he says. “The idea of getting back to ‘handmade’ films, character studies… I was desperate for that feeling.”
Fast-forward two years, though, and here’s Oscar Isaac, on Zoom, talking about playing a little-known, ultraviolent comicbook character named Moon Knight. So, what happened?
“It felt ‘handmade’,” he says, simply. “Andit’s the first legitimate Marvel character-study since Iron Man. Plus…” — and at this point a wicked grin creeps across Isaac’s countenance — “I thought, ‘Maybe I can hijack this thing. Maybe this is the chance to do something really fucking nutty on a major stage.’”
But how exactly to out-fucking-nutty what Phase Four of the MCU has already thrown up — from the genre-smashing weirdness of WandaVision to the mind-melting, cameostuffed scale of Spider-Man: No Way Home?