Seems like it should be fairly easy to get Oscar Isaac to play Snake in Metal Gear Solid
As far as we know, Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Metal Gear Solid movie hasn’t made much actual progress since we heard that it was officially in development back in 2017. In terms that Metal Gear players will understand, the project has made it out of the submarine and into the underground storage area, but it hasn’t gotten to the elevator for the title card reveal and the shot where Solid Snake takes off his mask. Hell, it probably hasn’t even figured out how to get past the first few guards yet. In theory, though, it shouldn’t be too hard for Vogt-Roberts to land a pretty famous face for that big sequence, assuming people in Hollywood actually talk to each other.
This all started last night, when IGN shared a video of the cast of Netflix’s Triple Frontier that briefly touched on what video game movies the cast would like to be in (Ben Affleck would like to see a Dig Dug movie!). That cast happens to include everyone’s Star Wars boyfriend Oscar Isaac, who said, “Metal Gear Solid, that’s the one. I’m throwing my hat in for that one.” He came up with the answer pretty quick, implying that he had actually thought of it before sitting down with IGN, and when pressed on which character he’d play, Isaac immediately said “Snake.” That’s the obvious answer, certainly, but the real question is whether or not he’d play the other Snake, who—spoiler alert for a game from 1998—is a clone of the same guy that Solid Snake was cloned from. (And let’s not forget the third clone, who became an evil president!)
Now, a famous person generating some buzz by name-dropping a big nerd thing like this doesn’t necessarily mean that anything will ever come of it, but Vogt-Roberts shared an intriguing tease on social media after seeing the IGN interview. As shown in a heavily redacted texting conversation from August of last year, Vogt-Roberts actually asked artist BossLogic to put together a concept art image of Isaac as Solid Snake. In other words, the guy making the Metal Gear Solid movie considered Oscar Isaac for the role long before Isaac threw his proverbial hat in.
As seen in that tweet, Vogt-Robert notes that this is “not news,” since the process of actually casting Isaac “hasn’t even started,” but he does point out that “the ball’s in Oscar’s court.” Essentially, the director has already implied that he likes Isaac for the part and Isaac has already publicly stated that he’d like the part, so all they should theoretically have to do is get Isaac to formally commit and work out an official deal. Going back to Metal Gear Solid terms, they’ve got the three keys at the right temperature, they just need to physically take them to the computer system and activate the Metal Gear itself. Of course, in the game, that was part of the bad guy’s plan to trick Snake into activating the Metal Gear’s nuclear warhead, so Vogt-Roberts should still watch out for anybody with big aviator sunglasses and a phony accent.