Oscar Isaac shuts his eyes tight, guitar in hand, and the world goes away. Which is convenient, because the world keeps presenting him with unwelcome facts, here in his 37th year: Turns out that if you’re a dreamily handsome actor who delivers fierce, incandescent, once-in-a-generation performances worthy of Pacino and De Niro, and then takes big roles in Star Wars and X-Men movies, you will become famous, and people will start calling you a movie star. Who knew? “I’m an actor, not a star,” he’ll say, bristling politely, if probed too hard on the subject of his rise. “I don’t really know what you mean when you say ‘star,’ ‘movie star,’ that stuff.”
Isaac never planned for any of this – never planned for much of anything, really – and he’s trying to keep it all out of his head. He’s obsessed with craft, indifferent to celebrity, private by instinct. The money is nice, not that he’s spending much of it, but the only part of success he truly covets is having his pick of roles. He’s bemused by the fervent female fan base he’s acquired, with bloggers calling him “the Internet’s boyfriend.” “The Internet never struck me as being into monogamous relationships,” he says with a small laugh. “It’s very promiscuous, the Internet.” (The Internet almost dumped him last year when an old picture emerged of him wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the cover of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. “I liked the design,” he says. “I didn’t think wearing the shirt was saying I agreed with all her politics. I’m not a libertarian!”)
Isaac still lives in the same one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he bought before his career’s recent uptick. He doesn’t own a car (“You know how much a garage is? It’s like paying rent!”). He did at least renovate his Brooklyn place, and purchased homes for his mom and sister. He’ll consider a larger apartment if he has kids, or, as he puts it, “if I duplicate or replicate.”
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Image via Rollingstone.com