![\"Tank](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/GQ%20US%20-%20MOTY%202025%20-%20Cover%20-%20Oscar%20Isaac%20(Dig).jpg\"\/)
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Tank top by Louis Vuitton Men\u2019s. Pants by Celine. Belt by Artemas Quibble. His own necklace (throughout) by Cartier.<\/p>\n
In any given Frankenstein movie<\/strong> (there have been hundreds of them since the first film based on Mary Shelley\u2019s novel opened in 1910) the plum role is usually the creature. He\u2019s the one who learns to feel, who discovers man\u2019s inhumanity, who makes us cry. His creator, on the other hand, is typically just a means to an end\u2014the ethically sketchy guy who throws the switch and says: It\u2019s alive!\u2014and with all due respect to Sting, Udo Kier, Raul Julia, and every other legendary actor who\u2019s played the role over the years, just about the only Dr. Frankenstein anybody remembers is Gene Wilder\u2019s. (\u201cIt\u2019s pronounced Frahn-ken-steen.\u201d)<\/p>\n In Guillermo del Toro\u2019s Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi does transformative work as the creature, whose ennobled suffering gives this most Catholic of Frankenstein adaptations its broken heart. But the movie\u2019s fevered energy, particularly in the first half, comes courtesy of Oscar Isaac, whose Victor Frankenstein has a madman\u2019s eyes, a front man\u2019s strut, and family-of-origin issues so serious Freud would choke on his Raisinets. \u201cI think our version, this Victor, has a lot of rage in him,\u201d Isaac says. \u201cDefiance was a word we used a lot\u2014a lot of addicts, that\u2019s one of the main things they have. Defiance against circumstances, against themselves, against their past. So the fun thing with Victor is I played him like an addict, even though the only thing you see him ingest is milk, as a way to get Mom\u2019s milk back.\u201d<\/p>\n GQ: This was a bucket list project for Guillermo\u2014the film he\u2019s been wanting to make since before he started making films. How did he pitch it to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n Oscar Isaac:<\/strong> I went to his house, just to meet. We sat in his kitchen and ordered take-out Cuban food, and we\u2019re sitting there eating rice and beans and pork, and we just started talking about our fathers. We started talking about our dads, and the pain and the joy and forgiveness, and becoming fathers ourselves and what\u2019s inherited, as far as pain and trauma. And how one moves forward in relation to that kind of a past and either trying to run away from it or trying to fix it or change it or holding onto a lot of these resentments. And at the end of that conversation, he said, \u201cI\u2019m making Frankenstein, and I think you need to play Victor.\u201d<\/p>\n And I said, \u201cYou\u2019re doing what?\u201d He\u2019s like, \u201cIt\u2019s this thing I\u2019ve always wanted to make, and I just think that you need to be Victor.\u201d And so of course it was an incredible moment, but I was protective of getting too excited. I\u2019m like, Maybe he\u2019s just having an aneurysm right now, or who knows\u2014maybe he just says that to everybody, that\u2019s like his pickup line. And then within a few months he was writing pages. And within a year\u2014well, at first he gave me Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein when I left. And the Tao Te Ching. And he was like, \u201cThese are the two books you need to read.\u201d And then we kept talking, and then within a year he had the whole beginning and the end and then descriptions of a lot of the middle. And we got together in New York, and we sat down and I read basically all the parts and he just watched and listened. And particularly the ending, which is so much about how do you move forward with a broken heart and how do you forgive? We were both just in tears. And then it started to feel real.<\/p>\n In what way is this a Taoist Frankenstein, do you think?<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, I think Guillermo\u2019s kind of a Taoist filmmaker. It was interesting. A lot of it is a bit of a God\u2019s-eye view of the world and of reality. There\u2019s a circularity to it. There is, even in all of the ugliness and the darkness, there is this kind of benign awareness that ultimately there is a loving universe underneath all of the pain that can be accessed. And so I think that\u2019s where he approaches [the Frankenstein story], as horrible as it is, as archetypal as it is\u2014because it is a heightened expression of these Jungian type of shadow psyches that are very broken. And so you\u2019re delving inward, to tell this really big story. It was unlike anything I\u2019ve ever done.<\/p>\n So you had the heaviest possible conversation, over Cuban food, before the name \u201cFrankenstein\u201d was even mentioned.<\/strong><\/p>\n We did. But Guillermo is such an incredibly joyful person. And the set was joyful. We were laughing all the time. He basically directed me in dirty jokes, and we only spoke in Spanish to each other. I think because there was so much joy and lightness, we were able to go full tilt with the darkness as well.<\/p>\n It\u2019s an emotional Mexican melodrama that we made. This is a very European story told in an extremely Latin point of view. At one point I was like, \u201cThat is a lot, man. Is this too much?\u201d And he is like, \u201cLook, cabr\u00f3n, it is not an accident that my Victor\u2019s real name is Oscar Isaac Hern\u00e1ndez.\u201d<\/p>\n When you\u2019re coming up with a performance, do you like to start with an idea and move toward something physical and tactile, or do you like to go the other way?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think I try to listen to what the story is or what the project is. So I don\u2019t have a very strict way that I get into it. I\u2019m also pretty gullible, so it\u2019s easy for me to buy into stuff. Maybe that\u2019s because of a religious upbringing where it was like: You have to believe. So there\u2019s a fear of not believing, like, I\u2019ve got to believe this. Even if I have doubts. It\u2019s like, There\u2019s no other choice. I\u2019ll go to hell otherwise. And that\u2019s how I approach scripts!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tank top by Louis Vuitton Men\u2019s. Pants by Celine. Belt by Artemas Quibble. His own necklace (throughout) by…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":369369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[392,171,4180,8935,14979,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-369368","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-onecolumn","12":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115525933381838024","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}