Oscar Isaac talks “excruciating” experience of working on X-Men: Apocalypse

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

The X-Men franchise got a terrific restart with X-MEN: FIRST CLASS in 2011, and then followed it up with the even better X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. X-MEN: APOCALYPSE came after, and that entry was…yeah. The movie will not go down as one of the greats in the field by a long shot, but it was an especially rough shoot for Oscar Isaac, who played the titular baddie, Apocalypse. The actor was beyond caked in prosthetics, and in a new video looking back on his career, he talked about how “excruciating” the experience was.

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As part of GQ’s recurring series where they sit down with actors and have them look back on their resume of acting roles. Isaac looks back fondly on movies like DRIVE, STAR WARS and INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, for which he talked about learning to play guitar from a master just for an audition. But then they get to X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, which Isaac said he signed on for so he could work with the talented bunch of actors, including James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence. However, his experience was very, very different than what he signed up for.

“Apocalypse, that was excruciating. I didn’t know when I said yes that that was what was going to be happening. That I was going to be encased in glue, latex, and a 40-pound suit—that I had to wear a cooling mechanism at all times. I couldn’t move my head, ever.”

In the movie, he plays the first mutant ever, and one who is so powerful he has the ability to wipe out all of humanity and intends to do so. He continued talking about the experience, discussing the ridiculous contraption they had to place him on, which involved having to wheel him around the set between takes and into a special cooling tent.

“I couldn’t move my head. And I had to sit on a specially designed saddle, because that’s the only thing I could really sit on, and I would be rolled into a cooling tent in-between takes. And so I just wouldn’t ever talk to anybody, and I was just gonna be sitting and I couldn’t really move, and like, sweating inside the mask and the helmet. And then getting it off was the worst part, because they just had to kind of scrape it off for hours and hours. So, that was ‘X-Men: Apocalypse.”

He also revealed he had to wear high-heels inside his boots, and that the sounds from the rubber on the suit made recording dialogue difficult, meaning it had to all be dubbed later. So, basically, it’s as if he got to play Batman, but had to wear each suit from all the movies at the exact same time.

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The movie went on to earn mostly negative-mediocre reviews and experienced a big dip at the box office from FUTURE PAST. But he’s had some better luck in the blockbuster arena with the STAR WARS movies, in which he has to wear minimal prosthetics to play pilot Poe Dameron. At least now in the future if he’s ever asked to play a villain he’ll know to ask, “Will I be able to move my head?”

You can watch the full video below.