Oscar Isaac

Oscar Isaac (born March 9, 1979, Guatemala City, Guatemala) is a Guatemalan-born American actor known for his versatility in roles, from Prince John in Robin Hood (2010) to family man Abel Morales in A Most Violent Year (2014) to dashing fighter pilot Poe Dameron in the Star Wars film series.

Early life

Isaac was born in Guatemala City to a Guatemalan mother, María Eugenia Estrada Nicolle, and a Cuban father, Óscar Gonzalo Hernández-Cano. The family moved to the United States when Isaac was five months old in order for his father to finish his medical residencies as a pulmonologist. The family first moved to Baltimore and then to New Orleans before eventually settling in Miami when Isaac was six years old. In a 2017 interview with Esquire magazine, Isaac recalled how he never felt entirely comfortable in Miami:

The Latin culture is so strong[,] which was really nice, but you had to drive everywhere, and it’s also strangely quite conservative. Money is valued, and nice cars and clothes, and what you look like, and that can get sort of tedious.

He first discovered a love of acting in middle school, where he participated in theatrical performances. In high school he became involved with various punk and ska bands as a guitarist and vocalist, and he considered pursuing a career as a musician. He attended Miami Dade College for a time while acting and performing music. In 2001, while he was in New York City performing in an Off-Broadway stage production, Isaac visited the prestigious Juilliard School and, on a whim, asked to audition. Although the audition deadline had passed, Isaac persisted and was admitted to Juilliard, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2005.

Career

Isaac performed in minor roles on television and in film before he was cast as Joseph in the biblical drama film The Nativity Story (2006). In the early 2010s his career started gaining momentum. He played Prince John opposite Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood in director Ridley Scott’s 2010 action film Robin Hood. In 2011 Isaac portrayed Standard Gabriel, a troubled former convict, in the action-drama film Drive. He went on to play a CIA agent alongside Jeremy Renner in the action thriller The Bourne Legacy (2012).

Isaac landed his breakout role in the dark comedy-drama Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, for which he earned a Golden Globe Award nomination. He played the lead character, a struggling folk singer, loosely based on 1960s folk musician Dave Van Ronk. In 2014 Isaac starred as conflicted family man Abel Morales in the crime drama A Most Violent Year and as a mysterious and reclusive tech entrepreneur in the science-fiction thriller Ex Machina.

Isaac first appeared as the roguish fighter pilot Poe Dameron in Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens (2015) and reprised that role in Star Wars Episode VIII—The Last Jedi (2017) and Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker (2019). He took on a different sort of science-fiction role in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), playing mutant supervillain En Sabah Nur, also known as Apocalypse. In 2019 Isaac voiced the character of Gomez Addams in the animated dark comedy The Addams Family; he reprised the role in The Addams Family 2 (2021).

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In a 2020 interview with Deadline, he expressed a desire to take a short break from big-budget franchise films and work on independent films instead:

I enjoyed the challenge of those [franchise] films and working with a very large group of incredible artists and actors, prop makers, set designers, and all that was really fun, but it’s not really what I set out to do. What I set out to do was to make handmade movies, and to work with people that inspire me.

In 2021 he starred as card shark William Tell in director Paul Schrader’s thriller The Card Counter. Later that year he appeared in the sci-fi action film Dune as Duke Leto Atreides, father of protagonist Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), and he made waves in the TV miniseries Scenes from a Marriage, a retelling of the miniseries of the same name by filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, in which Isaac played a professor who is estranged from his wife.

In 2022 he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the miniseries Moon Knight, and his role required him to play two very distinct characters—museum-shop employee Steven Grant and mercenary Marc Spector—who share a body and a supernatural hero identity. In 2023 he voiced the role of Miguel O’Hara, a hero also known as Spider-Man 2099, in the animated superhero film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

In addition to his acting work, Isaac also has served as a producer on many projects, including the historical drama Operation Finale (2018), Scenes from a Marriage, and Moon Knight. He also appeared in several stage productions, taking on the titular role in The Public Theater’s 2017 production of Hamlet and the lead role in a 2023 production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Isaac and his wife, Elvira Lind, who is a writer and filmmaker, started their own production company, Mad Gene Media, in 2019. Their short film, The Letter Room (2020), was nominated for a 2021 Academy Award.