Juilliard-trained actor and X-Men Villain Apocalypse star Oscar Isaac is creating buzz in his performance in the upcoming movie A Most Violent Year. Set in the 1980's in New York City, Isaac plays a small business owner of a heating-oil company trying to grow their family business while at the same time "fending off gangsters and government investigators."
"1981 was a transitional moment" in New York, the 34-year old actor said. "The city had to choose. Was it going to escalate the violence? Go down the path of bankruptcy and decay? Or was it going to seek another road? Abel (Isaac's character) represents that choice."
Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty and Interstellar) plays as his wife, Anna, who keeps their family business' book records. Incidentally, Chastain was also a Juilliard student so they definitely brought that training to both their characters in the movie.
They even made up a story of the relationship between their characters. "J.C. created a film that takes place in the present tense," Isaac mentioned. "There's no flashbacks to what happened. There aren't explanations of where they came from, how they met. J.C. loves that ambiguity, but for an actor it was important to be specific."
His character Abel's choice was also fascinating. "He's someone who buys full-heartedly into the American dream and the myth of the self-made man. Refusing to arm his drivers is as much a part of his upwardly mobile reinvention as his tailored suits. If he encouraged violence, he'd be dismissed as a gangster, as just some Latin thug," Isaac said of his character's decision.
Sounds interesting, right? The movie, which was first shown in Canada last November and was recently named the Best Film of 2014 by the National Board of Review. It is scheduled to hit theaters on December 31,2014.
