For us die-hard X-Men fans, watching Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse was painful as shit. It’s a terrible movie, and Singer was justifiably booted from the franchise after that. But as horrible as it was for us to watch, it was much worse for poor Oscar Isaac, who was buried under a mountain of prosthetics to play the villain, En Sabah Nur aka Apocalypse.
Speaking with GQ about his most iconic roles, Isaac called his time working on X-Men: Apocalypse “excruciating”, although he went into it with the highest of hopes…
“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 then a 40 pound suit that I had to wear a cooling mechanism in at all times. I couldn’t really move my head ever …
I was like, ‘Oh I get to work with all of these actors I like so much!’ but I couldn’t even see them because I couldn’t move my head. I had to like 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 tank in between takes, so I just wouldn’t ever talk to anybody. I couldn’t really move, I was just kinda sitting and sweating inside the mask and the helmet.
And then I was also in high heels inside of a boot, so that was very difficult to move at all, and every time I moved it was like rubber and plastic squeaking, so everything I said had to be dubbed later as well. And then getting it off was the worst part, because they had to kinda scrape it off for hours and hours. So … that was X-Men: Apocalypse!”
Honestly, if you didn’t already know Isaac was in it you’d never recognize him as Apocalypse. I’m sure he’d probably prefer it that way given how the movie turned out. Pretty sure we’ll never see him back doing another X-Men movie, but Disney may have other ideas. He’d make an interesting Cyclops, just sayin’.
