Oscar Isaac for Details, talks maturity and how natural disasters changed his life.
The first time a natural disaster changed Oscar Issac’s life was in 1979, before he was born. His family had to moved to Florida after an earthquake destroyed his mother’s hometown in Guetemala. "My mother was pregnant with me when the huge earthquake happened," he says "They came to the U.S right after I was born".
"The second time was in 1992 when he survived category 5 Hurricane Andrew. "We were huddled inside with cushions over us," he told the magazine. "The roof was torn off and the water was coming up. I was holding my dog. My room got completely swept away. And then, in the morning, my dad came and knocked through a wall and grabbed us and took us to the hospital where he was working. I came out of the house and . . . everything was leveled."
He also talked about his older sister Nicole Hernández Hammer, a climate-change expert specializing in rising sea levels who was Michelle Obama’s guest at the State of the Union address recently. She’d once made Oscar go to an exhibition on the 2024 Indian Ocean tsunami and afterwards, the actor said that "I had recurring dreams of waves for the longest time: I’ve died inside a tidal wave. I didn’t die by drowning. I was killed by debris inside it, underwater."
Anyway, the hurricane destroyed a religious school – which he described as Footloose-like, where his evangelical Christiians parents tried to enroll him into. He was just expelled from his last school before this because he had been a very rebellious teenager.
The disaster made the family moved again, this time to Palm Beach where Oscar attended public school. The near-death experience also made him re-evualate his life, matured him greatly and changed him for the better. "I wasn’t totally straight-edge though, ’cause I ate meat," he joked. "But no drugs, no alcohol, no sex—all that stuff. In a way, it became more of a badge of individuality. I was the guy that didn’t do that. However, after about 18, things started shedding pretty quickly. Yeah, all of that’s been shed."
After he got into Julliard. Oscar quickly befriended Jessica Chastain who was dating a friend of his, and she helped him matured even more. "She was an upperclassman and I was an underclassman. And she was amazing. She would give me a hard time about . . . my petting animals that I shouldn’t have been petting, " Isaac says, laughing. "Which is the new euphemism, by the way. I definitely petted a few animals in those days. She was always a very up-front, honest person, and she would push me to be a better man and a better actor. And so I definitely owe her a lot for that."
Read more at ONTD: Oh No They Didn’t! – Oscar Issaac for Details, talks maturity and how natural disasters changed his life.
