This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Forgo,. Welcome to the show.

Today, I am joined by actor, Oscar Isaac.

You've likely seen him in films like A Most Violent Year, Ex Machina,

The Card Counter, and Dune. Or maybe you've seen him on television and shows like Moon Night or scenes from a marriage. But before this remarkable run, Isaac was a young, hustling actor in New York

City trying to make a name for himself.

As he joked during his recent S&L monologue, I'm half Guatemalan, half Cuban, or, as casting

directors call that, ethnically ambiguous. So it's no surprise then that Isaac's first

leading man opportunity came from a pair of filmmakers

who've built a career just outside the mainstream Hollywood system.

It was in 2013 that brothers Joel and Ethan Cohen hired Isaac to play the titular character

of Inside Lewin Davis.

The film set in Greenwich Village, circa 1961, spans a week in the life of a talented but uncompromising

folk singer who can't seem to get out of his own way.

Isaac has returned to that same time and place, this time on stage, in a new production of the sign in Sydney

Brewsteen's window, written by the late seminal playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

Set in the apartment of couple Iris and Sydney Brewstein, Isaac plays what Hansberry once described

as a nervous, ulcerated banjo-making young man,

and whom I see an embodiment of a certain kind of Greenwich Village intellectual.

As for today, I wanted to talk to Oscar about making his Broadway debut

with the prescient political writing of Lorraine Hansberry.

We also get into his childhood in Florida,

finding creativity early, his punk rock salad days in high school, then Juilliard, and how each of those eras shape the heart and spirit of the work that followed. This is Oscar Isaac.

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