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In any given Frankenstein movie (there have been hundreds of them since the first film based on Mary Shelley’s novel opened in 1910) the plum role is usually the creature. He’s the one who learns to feel, who discovers man’s inhumanity, who makes us cry. His creator, on the other hand, is typically just a means to an end—the ethically sketchy guy who throws the switch and says: It’s alive!—and with all due respect to Sting, Udo Kier, Raul Julia, and every other legendary actor who’s played the role over the years, just about the only Dr. Frankenstein anybody remembers is Gene Wilder’s. (“It’s pronounced Frahn-ken-steen.”)
In Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Jacob Elordi does transformative work as the creature, whose ennobled suffering gives this most Catholic of Frankenstein adaptations its broken heart. But the movie’s fevered energy, particularly in the first half, comes courtesy of Oscar Isaac, whose Victor Frankenstein has a madman’s eyes, a front man’s strut, and family-of-origin issues so serious Freud would choke on his Raisinets. “I think our version, this Victor, has a lot of rage in him,” Isaac says. “Defiance was a word we used a lot—a lot of addicts, that’s one of the main things they have. Defiance against circumstances, against themselves, against their past. So the fun thing with Victor is I played him like an addict, even though the only thing you see him ingest is milk, as a way to get Mom’s milk back.”
Oscar Isaac: I went to his house, just to meet. We sat in his kitchen and ordered take-out Cuban food, and we’re sitting there eating rice and beans and pork, and we just started talking about our fathers. We started talking about our dads, and the pain and the joy and forgiveness, and becoming fathers ourselves and what’s inherited, as far as pain and trauma. And how one moves forward in relation to that kind of a past and either trying to run away from it or trying to fix it or change it or holding onto a lot of these resentments. And at the end of that conversation, he said, “I’m making Frankenstein, and I think you need to play Victor.”
And I said, “You’re doing what?” He’s like, “It’s this thing I’ve always wanted to make, and I just think that you need to be Victor.” And so of course it was an incredible moment, but I was protective of getting too excited. I’m like, Maybe he’s just having an aneurysm right now, or who knows—maybe he just says that to everybody, that’s like his pickup line. And then within a few months he was writing pages. And within a year—well, at first he gave me Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when I left. And the Tao Te Ching. And he was like, “These are the two books you need to read.” And then we kept talking, and then within a year he had the whole beginning and the end and then descriptions of a lot of the middle. And we got together in New York, and we sat down and I read basically all the parts and he just watched and listened. And particularly the ending, which is so much about how do you move forward with a broken heart and how do you forgive? We were both just in tears. And then it started to feel real.
Well, I think Guillermo’s kind of a Taoist filmmaker. It was interesting. A lot of it is a bit of a God’s-eye view of the world and of reality. There’s a circularity to it. There is, even in all of the ugliness and the darkness, there is this kind of benign awareness that ultimately there is a loving universe underneath all of the pain that can be accessed. And so I think that’s where he approaches [the Frankenstein story], as horrible as it is, as archetypal as it is—because it is a heightened expression of these Jungian type of shadow psyches that are very broken. And so you’re delving inward, to tell this really big story. It was unlike anything I’ve ever done.
We did. But Guillermo is such an incredibly joyful person. And the set was joyful. We were laughing all the time. He basically directed me in dirty jokes, and we only spoke in Spanish to each other. I think because there was so much joy and lightness, we were able to go full tilt with the darkness as well.
It’s an emotional Mexican melodrama that we made. This is a very European story told in an extremely Latin point of view. At one point I was like, “That is a lot, man. Is this too much?” And he is like, “Look, cabrón, it is not an accident that my Victor’s real name is Oscar Isaac Hernández.”
I think I try to listen to what the story is or what the project is. So I don’t have a very strict way that I get into it. I’m also pretty gullible, so it’s easy for me to buy into stuff. Maybe that’s because of a religious upbringing where it was like: You have to believe. So there’s a fear of not believing, like, I’ve got to believe this. Even if I have doubts. It’s like, There’s no other choice. I’ll go to hell otherwise. And that’s how I approach scripts!
With this, there was an emotional “in” right away, and it was with Guillermo. But also, I love playing with form. And I know one thing that Guillermo said was like, “This is not naturalistic. I need speed of speech and speed of thought.” And so we watched films from the ’30s and ’40s where the dialogue moves at a clip. I played with doing some of the speeches in iambic pentameter—just for myself, as a nerd. It was a way into finding the pleasure of the language.
And I think, for me, as painful and as dark of a character and as rageful and defiant of a character as Victor is, he’s also probably the most pleasurable character I’ve ever played. And again, character is kind of a conceptual thing. I bring an element, but then [costume designer] Kate Hawley shows up and expresses this person through these incredible costumes that suddenly I’m like: Oh, this. Oh, I see who Victor is. He is an artist. He would’ve maybe been a musician and he would’ve been on the forefront. He’s a punk. And so all that comes together to create this person.
That was one of Guillermo’s directions: He’s a rock star. That’s him in the studio. He’s looking where he wants the speakers, he’s looking where he wants the pyrotechnics. That’s how he struts around. It wasn’t so much him talking about his scientific achievements—it was like an emotional expression.
There’s a great, great behind-the-scenes of Prince—I think it was the performance for the Special Olympics. Watching the way he walks up onstage and is quite quiet, but moves around in his little black high-heeled shoes—I definitely took a lot of inspiration from that. How to move effortlessly through a space and own it and create.
I mean, it was a ska band, so there’s some set stuff. You gotta do some skanking.
Yeah. Pick it up, pick it up. I think there are quite a few videos of me online, skankin’ around onstage.
It’s a preexisting architecture.
My skanking? [Laughs.] Always. Always. Once a rude boy, always a rude boy.
Yeah. The blindness of what gets inherited. And him doing exactly the same things again. I can certainly relate to that feeling of running away from something so much that you run right into the arms of it without realizing it.
I think what Victor didn’t expect was this idea that the creature is an extension of himself. It’s like when people helicopter their kids because they’re so afraid they’ll look bad. Don’t embarrass me. And then there’s also the pride part of it. That’s mine. That’s my kid. My possession.
I think maybe that’s also the Catholic part of it— that grace isn’t only for those that deserve it. Because who really deserves it?
Or a lot of surrender. There’s a great line in a T Bone Burnett song where he says, “Everybody wants peace, but nobody wants to surrender.” Victor finally shows remorse for the first time, and kind of also forgives himself. He says, “Forgive yourself into existence.”
I mean, I think I try to give the benefit of the doubt often. Try to speak just what’s true, and what doesn’t divide people so much. That’s a Joseph Goldstein thing, a Buddhist monk thing. Yeah, I think I’ve definitely attempted to be more forgiving and to let go of resentments, the older I am.
I’m good at asking for forgiveness.
Yeah. That was a real likable quote. Jesus Christ. Y’know, people ask you things, you say stuff, you don’t really think about it that much. I said a slightly dickish thing.
Yeah. I mean, I’d be open to it, although right now I’m not so open to working with Disney. But if they can kinda figure it out and, you know, not succumb to fascism, that would be great. [Ed. note: This interview was conducted two days after ABC and Disney suspended production of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in response to comments Kimmel made following the death of Charlie Kirk. Kimmel was back on the air four days after this conversation took place.]
But if that happens, then yeah, I’d be open to having a conversation about a galaxy far away. Or any number of other things.
Well, it’s this doc that Elvira Lind—who’s an incredible documentary filmmaker, and who I happen to be married to—filmed in 2017, when I was doing Hamlet. And a lot of really wild things happened in life, and so her way of digesting it and processing it was just to pick up a camera. And years later, she’s put it together and it’s fascinating. It feels a little bit like a doc about a band making an album.
And yeah, it’s been incredible to revisit that. Also scary, to open up a window into how it’s done. How, as an artist, you use the things that happen in your life, and how those things affect the work and how the work becomes entwined with life and with death and marriage and birth and that kind of synthesis that happens. It’s hard to know what comes first—do we use that because we’re artists, or does using it make us artists?
I feel compassion for this person that’s in the middle of a storm, in a little tempest-tossed [boat]. Someone that’s trying to make sense of it by doing this work and doing it in public and trying to connect with other people.
Yeah. I mean, going back to who deserves forgiveness, that is the most challenging thing. How do you make a friend of your mind?
Lots of psychedelics.
A friendly stranger.
Alex Pappademas is GQ’s culture director.
This interview has been condensed and edited from a video you can see here.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of GQ with the title “Oscar Isaac: Leading Man of the Year”.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Tyrell Hampton
Styled by George Cortina
Grooming by Tim Nolan
Nails by Zolboo Zoey Batbaatar
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set design by Heath Mattioli
Produced by Camp Productions
Photographed on location at Chateau Marmont
