Oscar Isaac “Furious” Over X-Men Recut: “Apocalypse Is Supposed to Be a Party Animal”
Warning to film fans: If you go to X-Men: Apocalypse this summer, you won’t be seeing the movie its co-star, actor Oscar Isaac, thought he signed up for.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, the Oscar-nominated actor claimed he was “furious, and extremely fast” over the way his part (the villainous title character, Apocalypse) was re-edited in post, apparently “removing every trace” of performance he brought to the role.
“I called up [director Bryan] Singer on my vid-screen one day in pure traffic,” Isaac yelled as he stared exactly three inches to the left of the interviewer’s eyes the entire time. “I told him my vision for the role of Apocalypse: A jacked-up party Smurf with a rude ‘tude and a thirst for good times. His goal is to replace the boring world of humans with a 24-hour party zone where mutants can grab a frosty pils, hit the links with their Discraft Elite Z golf disc, and just Chillax.
“Bryan said that all of those were good ideas, except Chillax was technically owned by Marvel Studios so we couldn’t use that character. I said fine, and I thought that was it. I thought we saw eye-to-eye.”
Instead, says Isaac, his loose improvisational style for the character was railroaded during the filming process by Singer’s insistence that he do “one take for each scene where I don’t talk about parties or good vibes.” Sure enough, he says, those single takes were the ones Singer used every time in the final cut. Also, he was ordered to stop wearing his palm-tree sunglasses, which he personally bought for $2.50 at The Bum Hut on Psimo Beach, and “use both eyeballs to act instead. BOTH.”
At this point in the interview, Isaac rolled both eyes in opposite directions for 10 seconds, saying “These eyeballs belong to no shouty man. No shouty man but me. I am Captain of this Ship O’ Peepers.”
There are hints of the role Isaac thought he would be playing, if you watch the trailer. “When in the baby movie [X-Men: Apocalypse’s trailer] I say ‘from the ashes of their world, we’ll build a better one,’ I am 100% talking about carving a gnarly wave with Sammy Hagar, and then doing watermelon Jell-O shots with Tia Carrere. What other kind of world would I be even talking about? That’s the only kind of world that’s better than the one we live in right now. Duh. Doyyyyyy. What a big doyyyyyyyyyy from that director boy.”
Isaac had his suspicions before the final effects were finished, and attempted to sneak into the render farms at Hydraulx to insert his own work, which he had cooked up in After Effects the week before. “Not very much big stuff, I’m not a true pixel wizard,” he chuckled humbly, looking down, clearly expecting the interviewer to insist that he was a pixel wizard. “I just thought that maybe the audience could see a smidgelet of my true intentions for the character if I changed the opening, so that instead of getting buried in rubble in an Egyptian temple, it’s just me getting covered in palm fronds at the Cabo Wabo Cantina.”
Indeed, when speaking to the senior effects editor at Hydraulx, he confirmed the break-in. “Oscar made a very basic 3D mock-up of a blue man with a penis twice the size of his own leg, essentially just five tubes and a sphere for a head. Then Oscar animated the tube man getting knocked over and a bunch of green scribbles appearing, covering him up. Giant 3D lettering from every angle just said the words ‘Cabo Wabo’ and ‘You Understand Party Smurf Now.’
“He’s got a future in FX, if he keeps it up. He understands the basics of lighting, rigging and texture. He just needs to learn anatomy and hone his craft some. We were impressed but very upset that he deleted the entire first 15 minutes of the film from our servers, forcing us to start over.”
When Isaac was told what the senior editor at Hydraulx said, he responded with “I can do anything,” and stuck his thumb in his mouth, blowing really hard until his belt buckle broke. “You have to leave now, I broke another clothes. Pick a door, any door.”
The interviewer is still trapped inside Oscar’s dungeon apartment, but texted the entire transcript of the interview to her source at Vanity Fair. Isaac could not be reached for further comment.
