Oscar Isaac on growing up in Miami: I wasnt part of the Latino community.
I can’t find the exact quote now, but Jessica Chastain once let it slip in an interview that Oscar Isaac is quite the Romeo. Like, he might do the puppy-dog eyes and the “you’re the only one who really gets me” line, but he’s quite the undercover ladies’ man. Just keep that in mind when you’re looking through the amazing cover editorial for the January issue of GQ (on stands nationally December 22). Oscar is promoting Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which makes me wonder… how big is his part in the film? I don’t know. But I love the puppy-dog eyes. God help me, he could use the silliest, dumbest line on me and it would totally work. A few things: he uses his first and middle name as his stage name and his real last name is Hernandez. He grew up in Miami. He’s half Cuban and half Guatemalan. He speaks fluent Spanish. Sigh…you can read Oscar’s GQ profile here and here are some highlights:
Moving to the US from Guatemala when he was a baby: “For my father, individualism was very important, and he instilled that in me. It was way more important to recognize myself as an individual than as a part of a group. I wasn’t part of the ‘Latino community.’ I was just a kid in high school with friends, who was into playing music… I never thought of myself as an ethnic actor. I don’t feel comfortable saying I speak for Guatemalans. Or for Latino men. Or for Latin men that are five nine….”
He was a straight-arrow as a kid: “It became a badge of individuality. I was the guy that didn’t drink, and it just felt good to be that… I’m not a huge drinker. I didn’t drink until I was 25 years old.”
His family converted to Evangelical Christianity when he was a boy: “My dad was a man of extremes. And the way my mom was raised, she followed her husband. So if God spoke to my father one day and said we were not supposed to have a TV in the house, it was suddenly gone …. I was never frightened by it. I was more curious why I wasn’t feeling the real thing myself.” After Isaacs broke away from the Church, in what he calls a “slow amputation,” he began to find spiritual experiences in his acting methodology.
Whether he worries about the Star Wars geeks & filming more movies: “No! Because what’s so fun about it is…it’s all made-up! It’s all f–king made-up, but in a great way. We get to create it as we go.”
Like some other people we’ve been talking about recently, Oscar sometimes comes across as tightly wound. The GQ writer notes that Oscar made some kind of mention of a “girlfriend” but called the next day to take it back. He’s very focused on forging his own path and not wanting to be seen as “the Latino actor” or “the Latin heartthrob.” Which I understand, because he doesn’t want to be typecast and if his ethnicity is a blank space, he’ll be up for a wider range of roles.
But… I do think it’s strange that he has a classic immigrant’s tale of arriving in America as a baby and assimilating completely as an American (GQ says he didn’t become a citizen until 2006), but he still doesn’t identify at all with “the Latino community.” He grew up in Miami, an American city with one of the highest populations of Spanish-speakers and Latin-Americans. He grew up bilingual in a household where Spanish was mostly spoken. It’s weird, right? Why can’t he say that he’s part of the Latino community? Would that change his success story?
Photos courtesy of Nathaniel Goldberg/GQ.
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