Oscar Isaac Calls His Time on ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ “Excruciating”

Oscar Isaac, who played the eponymous ancient mutant in X-Men: Apocalypse, says the costume and makeup effects required to portray the villain made his time on set “excruciating.”

“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,” Isaac told GQ of portraying the blue-skinned supervillain.

The convoluted and restrictive getup prohibited Isaac from moving his head, cutting the star off from cast mates Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, and James McAvoy.

“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.”

Isaac was required to wear what he described as “high heels inside of a boot,” which made it “very difficult to move at all.”

“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.”

Lawrence, who has portrayed blue and scaly Mystique across four X-Men films, expressed similar complaints in 2015, before returning for Dark Phoenix: “It’s just the paint,” she told EW about her then-unsure X-Men future. “I can’t even pronounce this and that’s going in my nose? I’m breathing that?”

Lawrence, Fassbender, McAvoy return for Dark Phoenix alongside Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Nicholas Hoult, out June 7, 2019. Isaac next returns as hotshot pilot Poe Dameron in Star Wars: Episode IX, in theaters December 20, 2019.