Interview with Oscar Isaac
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Oscar Isaac
Guatemalan-born actor raised in Miami and trained at Juilliard, known for Inside Llewyn Davis, Ex Machina, Poe Dameron in the Star Wars films and Frankenstein.
Source: SAG-AFTRA Foundation on YouTube
These answers are taken from Oscar Isaac Career Retrospective | Conversations at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation on SAG-AFTRA Foundation's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
What was your very first experience with acting?
It was actually fifth grade when I first did theater. It was a great teacher, Mrs. Stucky. I remember her. She was so loving, and at the time my parents were divorcing, so it was just like a nightmare at home. It was a very nuclear divorce. And the assignment was to write a paragraph as one of the animals on Noah's Ark. And I went home and I wrote like an eight-page musical, and I brought it to her. She's like, "We're going to do this. We're going to put this on, and you should play the platypus." And I was like, "Yeah, that sounds great." So we put the play on, and there were like four songs in it. There was like a rapping alligator.
It was an incredible moment that happened. And then at school I started doing more plays. The next year, in sixth grade, we would do these plays that were all religious themed. So of course I was the devil in one of them, in a boxing match with Jesus. And then the next year I played Jesus, resurrecting Lazarus.
What attracted you to begin a career as an actor?
A friend that was in that [tour] with me took me to see Oleanna at Area Stage, which was this little black box theater on South Beach. And I went in there, and it was the first straight play I'd ever seen, and it just blew my mind. I was just like, "This is incredible." And I waited afterward to meet the actors and to talk to the director, who was also the artistic director. To this day he still says it, to wait there and be like, "Hello sir, I'm Oscar, I want to work with you one day."
After Oleanna, there were all these other plays that I started really getting into. I fell in love with Pinter, and then Shakespeare. My sister was always such a huge Shakespeare fan, so we would watch those movies all the time. My father also had a real love of language, like etymology and where words come from, and so that translated to a want to understand dramatic literature. And then I thought, well, what are the actors that I love so much? And they're all ones that have incredible technique.
What was a great moment for you as an actor?
During Inside Llewyn Davis, what was amazing was that it was my first lead role. It was the very first one, which was amazing. And from the very first day, I realized they're not going to give me any validation. They just don't do that. They wouldn't say if it was good. On set they would just go "Yeah" to mean we got it. It would be maybe three, four takes max.
After a few days of realizing, oh, I can't go to them for validation, I can't go to them for confidence, it has to come from within or I just got to let that go. It was so freeing. It was so freeing to be like, we're just making something. We're just building a thing together. I'm just handing him a wrench and he's handing me a screwdriver, and we're just making it, and we're throwing stuff on the table, and if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't mean anything. That was so freeing, and I was like, I'm liberated. This is how I'm going to be from now on.
How did your acting career unfold?
I moved down to Miami, and really my first gig before Area Stage was at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. I got hired to do the children's tour, so we would go around to all the schools, high schools and middle schools, and do a play about domestic violence. Then I went to Area Stage, and they auditioned me for a play, playing this Cuban hustler. That kind of began this thing, and within two years I'd done like seven plays. I'd done plays there, and then there was another place called GableStage where I did This Is Our Youth, and Side Man, and a bunch of plays around there.
All About the Benjamins was the first speaking role I had. That was what got my SAG card. It was 2000.
Then I ended up going to New York, where I'd flown myself to audition for a play, for a director that I met in Miami, to play Fidel Castro. And then I passed by Juilliard, and I went in and I asked for an application. It was a Monday, and the application deadline was the Friday that had just passed. So I just schmoozed the lady. I was 22 when I went in.
What advice do you have for new actors?
I had a great teacher, Kate Wilson, a vocal coach who I've worked with quite a few times since. She always says, "Tools, not rules. They're just tools. If you need it, pick up this tool. You don't have to. It's not a rule." A lot of the students that would go there would feel like this is the only architecture that works for me to be able to perform, and of course that's deadly.
The fact that I did have a love of craft was saving me a lot, which was just like, it's okay, it's not about the shot. You have a way of building things, and I love that. It's all about fun and learning. If I'm not having fun, I'm probably learning. But if it can be both, that's great.
I do talk about acting as basically just humiliation management. You're watching somebody wrestle with their ego through a character, and that's the high-wire act. Everybody has their own ways of managing that humiliation, and seeing it that way also gives me a lot more compassion for people, whatever they're trying to figure out. It's hard. You're putting yourself out there, and that is the raw material of what you're working with.
Think about a demanding director, professor or cast mate. What made him or her difficult? How did you successfully interact with this person?
I went there when they would still do cuts. Your second year, they would just put a list up of people that were on probation, and then a lot of those people would just get cut from the program. It was brutal. And the list came up, and my name was on the list. Michael Kahn, who was the head of the drama division at the time, said, "Oscar, you're not on probation, but half of the faculty wanted you to be and half didn't." It turned out all of the technical teachers did not want me to be on probation. It was the acting teachers that wanted me to be on probation.
John Stix was this incredible teacher. He'd been around forever. And he's like, "Well, you were really bad in As You Like It," and I was like, I was, but in fairness everybody was pretty bad in that play. And then the other drama teacher said, you did a scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, and I gave you notes, and you didn't do them, and you brought in a different scene. And I said, well, I just wasn't right for the part. So I was just being a smartass, and they were trying to say you need to risk more. I was in a place of just trying to get it right so much. Toward my last year, John was like, "You're much better now. You used to just always try to get it right."
Have you progressed in your acting career as you have expected?
I had a two-year lull after that. It was so funny. All this time, if they just give me the shot, if they give me one chance, I will show them. Then I got that chance, and then it was done. And I was like, give me one more chance. And that's the thing. I started realizing, oh, it's not about the one shot. Not for me. That's not necessarily going to be my story.
I was disappointed, of course. I was still the guy that was like, I exist, please, I'm here. I heard someone talk about a rocket, with booster rockets. It shoots you up, but then after a certain moment you don't need that booster rocket anymore, and it falls to earth, and something else has to take over to keep shooting you up. Relying still on the same boosters was starting to become a maladaptation.
I feel like the last few years has also been a lot about surrendering the war with reality, and being able to accept things a bit more.
Who is your favorite actor, and why?
My favorite film, Dog Day Afternoon. I think it's one of the funniest films. Charles Durning and Chris Sarandon and of course Pacino and John Cazale. It's so funny when he's like, "I want to go to Wyoming." It's so intimate and sweet, and very funny. So for me, when it's a dramatic part, I always try to find what's the humor underneath it.
What are the actors that I love so much? They're all ones that have incredible technique. Raul Julia, and Tim Curry was an early one. I just read his memoir, Vagabond. It's great.
Describe your acting style.
When it's a dramatic part, I always try to find what's the humor underneath it. And vice versa, when it's a humorous part, it's like, what's the pain underneath that? That's what's most exciting to me.
A friend who's a really brilliant actor said to me, sometimes I don't know how you do it. You're in something and the thing is not working so much, or everybody else is in a different movie, and you can kind of go in and get in there. I was like, maybe I'm just gullible. I can buy into the fantasy maybe easier. It's just like that same kindergartner, able to just go all in on the fantasy, and there's just a lot of freedom in that.
That has been the big thing, trying to let go of how to work with much less obligation. It's an ongoing thing, but I feel like it's only within the last couple years that I've started to find ways of really allowing that to happen, feeling like I have no obligation to act when they say action. I have no obligation to cry because it says cry. And when that happens, it's just amazing the grace that occurs, because you start serving something else. It's not just yourself.
Tell me about a time where you had difficulty with a character. What was the role and why was it challenging?
I show up on Star Wars, and in the first scene Kathy Kennedy's coming up herself to fix my hair, and I just completely reverted back to, "Was that good? I don't know. Is that good?" Then the direction would be like, okay, now you're flying in the X-wing, and look to the left and you see your buddy explode, and it's scary, but not too scary. You're still heroic. And now you look forward. Now you have to make a decision that you are going to shoot the thing, but you're also terrified, but heroically terrified. And only look between here and here. And it's all green screen. To try to find some sense of confidence in that was just so tough, because the target was so small.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your resume.
We opened for Stone Temple Pilots, too. We played at the same festival, so maybe six hours apart, on a separate stage far away, but we opened for them. It counts. But it never occurred to me like it was a career. It just was what I was doing. My father was a musician as well, and had all this recording equipment at home and guitars, so I would just grab them when he wasn't around and start playing them or recording music. And that became a real love.
I was a young Latino in Miami. Oscar Hernandez is like John Smith down there. My dad's Oscar Hernandez, my grandpa's Oscar Hernandez. But it was more about, I was just being brought in for bad, stereotypical stuff. So I said, let me see what happens if I just go by Oscar Isaac. And then I definitely started getting brought in for more stuff.
Oscar Isaac's Full Biography
Oscar Isaac was born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada in Guatemala, to a Guatemalan mother, María Eugenia, and a Cuban father, Oscar Gonzalo Hernández-Cano, a pulmonologist. Oscar was raised in Miami, Florida. Before he became an actor, he played lead guitar and sang vocals in his band, the Blinking Underdogs. He graduated from the Juilliard School in 2005.
Isaac's first major film role was Joseph in the film The Nativity Story (2006). He also had a small role in All About the Benjamins (2002) and the Ché Guevara biopic Guerrilla (2011). In addition to movie appearances, he made an appearance in the television series Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001). He also had a part in the movies The Life Before Her Eyes (2007); Body of Lies (2008), alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe; Agora (2009), alongside Rachel Weisz; and the Australian film Balibo (2009), where he played José Ramos-Horta, former president of East Timor, set amid the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975; Isaac won the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role.
In 2013, Oscar starred in the Coen Brothers' folk music-themed comedy-drama, Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination. He subsequently starred in the crime drama A Most Violent Year (2014) and the science fiction thriller Ex Machina (2014), and appeared in the Star Wars films Star Wars: Episode VII, The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars: Episode VIII, The Last Jedi (2017), as X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, and the ninth X-Men film, X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), as the mutant supervillain Apocalypse. He has also headlined the HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero (2015) as politician Nick Wasicsko in 2015, which earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, Miniseries or Television Film.
He has two sons with his wife, Danish director Elvira Lind. He is also long-time friends with Triple Frontier (2019) co-star Pedro Pascal.