After X-Men: Days of Future Past sought to give the franchise a fresh start through its time travel retconning, 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse quickly put the series out of favor with audiences and critics once more, and as it turns out, acting in this film wasn’t exactly a fun journey for Oscar Isaac, either.
The Star Wars regular played the titular villain in the Bryan Singer-helmed flick, though you’d be forgiven for not recognizing him under all those layers of blue prosthetics. And in an interview with GQ, Isaac painted a nightmarish picture of his experience wearing that stuff on set:
“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, and latex, and in a 40-pound suit that I had to wear a cooling mechanism at all times.”
Though the actor was excited about collaborating with renowned performers like Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, and James McAvoy, Isaac claimed that all these preparations essentially isolated him from his co-stars.
“I was like, ‘oh, I get to work with these great actors that I like so much,’ but I couldn’t even see them because 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,” Isaac said. “So I just wouldn’t ever talk to anybody, and I’d just kind of be sitting [still] — and I couldn’t really move, and sweating inside the mask and helmet.”
But wait, there’s more. Isaac also recalled how he had to wear what he described as “high heels inside of a boot,” which made it a struggle to move around the set.
“And every time I moved, it was just like rubbers and plastic squeaking, so everything I said had to be dubbed later as well,” he explained with a chuckle. “And then getting it off was the worst part, because they just had to kind of scrape it off for hours and hours.”
For the star to endure all that just to emerge at the end with a film like X-Men: Apocalypse is both depressing and a little bit hilarious, though the problems for this series look to have only gotten worse from there.
In particular, the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants have each been the subject of ongoing reports of difficulties behind the scenes, with both films receiving extensive reshoots and heavy delays. Nonetheless, should all go to plan from here on out, Dark Phoenix will be hitting theaters on June 7th, 2019, followed by The New Mutants on August 2nd. After that, we may not be seeing an outright apocalypse for the franchise, but a reboot under Disney’s supervision certainly looks to be on the cards.