Oscar Isaac won’t badmouth X-Men: Apocalypse, though he does wish it were a “better film”
It helps that he has a new superhero thing going on
For a guy who often seems like a Serious Actor, Oscar Isaac is really a fixture of not only genre films but major blockbuster franchise films, having dipped his toe in Star Wars, X-Men, and now the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Moon Knight (which is a TV show, not a film, but what is a Disney+ TV show if not a two-hour film with four or six additional hours tacked on needlessly?). Speaking of X-Men, though, Isaac recently sat down with The New York Times to talk about Moon Knight, and he touched on the difficult experience he had working on X-Men: Apocalypse in 2016.
The New York Times asked him if he has “disowned” that film, in which he played the eponymous mega-villain mutant from the comics, but Isaac has mostly nice things to say about the experience. “I don’t disown it,” he said, since he’s still happy with the reasons he had for taking the job in the first place—which are getting to play Apocalypse, who he loved when he read X-Men comics as a kid, and getting to work with James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, and Jennifer Lawrence—but he does wish it had been a “better film” and that they “would have taken care of the character a little better.”
He has said in the past that filming the movie was “excruciating,” since the prosthetics and costume involved in playing Apocalypse were such an ordeal, and he told The New York Times that part of the issue was that he couldn’t even move or look at the actors he was so excited to work with. But still, he doesn’t seem to be too bent out of shape about it (his career didn’t seem to be hurt by it much, which probably makes things easier to swallow anyway).
Isaac also briefly touched on Florida’s so-called “don’t say gay” bill again, saying he’s “glad” that Disney took the right stand eventually and that it’s “astounding to watch a vindictive politician try to own the libs,” and he also noted that, “if Disney is going to own so much of the entertainment industry,” then it has to be willing to make a stand on issues like that. Which, yeah, good point!