Isaac and writer-director Hagai Levi preview HBO’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s devastating miniseries.
Fittingly,Oscar Isaacbegan his journey intoScenes From a Marriagewith a proposal of sorts.
“This is someone that knows me,” theStar Warsactor remembers thinking.
Illustration by Leonardo Santamaria for EW
“We have a similar language, and there’s just total trust.
And when I read [the script], I felt like this whole story is about that.
So we had a language about those things when we were young.”
Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac play an upper-middle-class couple whose union unravels in HBO’s ‘Scenes From a Marriage’.Jojo Whilden/HBO
It undoubtedly came in handy.
“The chemistry between them, from the first day, was unbelievable.”
(As anyone who sawthat viral video of the duoat the Venice Film Festival would expect.)
Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in ‘Scenes From a Marriage’.Jojo Whilden/HBO
(Levi previously co-createdThe AffairandBeTipul, the Israeli series that inspired HBO’sIn Treatment.)
I felt like he was an [old-fashioned] man; a cold, chauvinist a–hole.
I couldn’t relate to him.
And she starts the series as a very weak, dependent woman with no self-confidence.
I couldn’t see myself putting such a woman in current television."
From there, he says, “everything fell into place.”
“That was a very, very intense experience, emotionally and psychologically.”
(Most of the series takes place inside Jonathan and Mira’s house.)
Adds Isaac, “I think everyone on set felt quite vulnerable.
Crew members would come up and talk to me about breakups they had had.
It felt incredibly intimate and strange.”
That’s also an apt description for the experience of acting in the series.
That speaks to how close a lot of the scenes we were playing out felt."
“We didn’t plan in advance how we were going to play it,” Isaac recalls.
“We just showed up present, and played, and trusted each other.
That made it a very unique experience, at least for me.
I had never had a situation that felt quite as surprising.”
“What was revolutionary back then is now almost a cliche,” admits Levi.
But, he adds, “I’m saying something which is sometimes the opposite of what Bergman said.
He wanted to say, very explicitly, ‘Marriage kills love.’
"
Muses Isaac, “I do think it says that love is real.
This is not just a private story.
It should say something more than that.”
