“He thanked me, then said he considered me for the role, but I was too young.” Schrader concurred.
“I wrote him to say how absolutely remarkable it was, easily my favorite film of the year,” Isaac said. When Schrader’s Ethan Hawke eco-thriller “First Reformed” came out in 2017, garnering the filmmaker an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Isaac dropped Schrader a note. He just lays out everything I’m interested in.” “This was not about trying to communicate my skill. “I’d go to his office in midtown and we’d talk,” Isaac said. But Schrader and Isaac kept in touch as the actor’s star power grew.
When the company producing “The Jesuit” fell apart, the project dissipated (it was eventually made, years later, with a different director). “He has a face you can read into,” Schrader said. Schrader had most recently worked with Jeff Goldblum on the Holocaust thriller “Adam Resurrected” and Woody Harrelson for “The Walker,” but felt like taking a chance on the newcomer. Isaac first crossed paths with Schrader in 2010, when the actor was just a few years out of Julliard, and his best-known work was Prince John in the misbegotten Russell Crowe version of “Robin Hood.” Schrader was slated to direct “The Jesuit,” the story of a Latino man who gets out of prison and must rescue his kidnapped son, and Isaac auditioned for the lead. “It’s a cliché as an American actor to say that ’Taxi Driver’ is the thing that made me, but it was such a revolutionary piece of filmmaking, the stuff that changed it all for me and made me fall in love with movies.” “Paul’s work is in my DNA as an actor,” Isaac said over Zoom in a recent interview from his home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, admitting that his passion for the work stems back to the 75-year-old director’s most famous screenplay.
This fall, Isaac also appears in “ Dune” and the HBO miniseries “Scenes from a Marriage,” not to mention his voice work as Gomez Addams in “The Addams Family 2.” But “The Card Counter” crystallizes his talent like nothing else, in large part because he was so attuned to the material from the start. That context helps explain how Isaac turned up with his best performance to date in the midst of a busy season. Yet the seeds for this dark horse contender in the Oscar race for Best Actor go back much further than that. 'Belfast' Star Jamie Dornan Won't Play It Safe: 'If You Get Too Comfortable in This Industry, You're F**ked'Įmmy Predictions: Best Limited Series - Was It 'The Queen's Gambit' All Along?Ĥ5 Directors Pick Favorite Horror Movies: Bong Joon Ho, Tarantino, del Toro and More Why Rita Moreno Embraced Tony Kushner's Changes to 'West Side Story'
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