“X-Men: Apocalypse” is a pretty excruciating experience for audience members, let alone those that actually worked on the film. However, sitting through the 2-hour film in the comfort of a climate-controlled theater, as bad as it was, doesn’t compare to what star Oscar Isaac had to endure during the filming of the project.
In a new interview with GQ, Isaac goes over his most “iconic” characters, which includes his work on incredible films like “Annihilation,” “Ex Machina,” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.” However, one of his iconic roles turned out to be much worse than he bargained for when he said okay.
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“’Apocalypse,’ that was excruciating. I didn’t know, when I said yes, that I was going to be encased in glue and latex and a 40-pound suit that I had to wear a cooling mechanism at all times. I couldn’t really move my head, ever,” Isaac said about his work on the “X-Men” film.
In the film, the actor plays the titular villain, but unless you looked at the credits, you probably wouldn’t know that. You see, Isaac changed his voice, and as he mentioned, was buried under so many prosthetics and makeup that he’s truly unrecognizable.
He explained some more, “I was like, ‘Oh, I get to work with these great actors that I like so much,’ but I couldn’t even see them because I couldn’t move my head. And I had to sit on a specially designed saddle because that’s the only thing I could really sit on, and I would be rolled into a cooling tent in-between takes.”
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Isaac continued, “And every time I moved, it was like rubber and plastic squeaking. So everything I said had to be dubbed later, as well. And getting it off, was the worst part because they had to kind of scrape it off for hours and hours.”
Another interesting story that Isaac details in the video is how he came to work with director Nicolas Winding Refn on “Drive.” The film, which starred Isaac opposite Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, is often regarded as Refn’s best work to date. However, for the actor, when he read the script, he wasn’t impressed.
Isaac explains how he met Refn at a restaurant after reading the script, “I was actually coming to tell him that I wasn’t going to do the movie. When I read the script, I remember feeling that the character of Standard was…standard.”
He added, “When he said, ‘Well, if it could be anything you wanted what would it be?’ So, we sat there for four hours, in this restaurant, and we just went through it and just kind of spit-balled and came up all these ideas…”
The actor also talks about one of the more interesting things about Refn that he discovered while filming “Drive.” “I also remember on set, Nicolas Refn would always wear a blanket around his midsection because that’s where he [in Refn’s voice] ‘kept the energy warm,’” explained Isaac.
The moral of the story? Working on ‘Apocalypse’ was probably worse than enduring its run-time and Nicolas Winding Refn is just as unique as you are probably expecting.