Oscar Isaac debuted in Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Poe Dameron in its opening scene. However, a prank phone call from Albert Brooks nearly cost him the part.
“I was doing A Most Violent Year, and I found out that [director] J.J. [Abrams] wanted to meet with me for a part, and that I needed to fly to Paris,” Isaac recalled to GQ. “I remember, I actually still have the voice message saved, ’cause I remember in between shooting I got a message from an unknown caller, and it was a voice, it was like, ‘Hey Oscar, it’s J.J. Ya know, you don’t have to come all the way out to Paris. What’re you gonna do, play a droid? You don’t need to be doing that. Actually, this is Albert Brooks.’ ‘Cause Albert was in the movie, so he really had me going for a second there, and I’m very happy that I still have that voice message.”
While the prank didn’t end up panning out and Isaac met with Lucasfilm anyway, the nature of his character’s original part almost gave the actor doubts about whether or not he should accept the gig.
“Then I ended up going out to Paris and I met with him and [Lucasfilm president] Kathy Kennedy and [writer] Lawrence Kasdan and we sat in an office, and they pitched me a story. It’s like this heroic guy, he’s a first person, he’s in the crawl, you know, when they describe him,” the actor detailed. “He’s Leia’s number one pilot, and he shows up, and you have this scene with Max Von Sydow. And then the main bad guy shows up, and then you die, spectacularly.”
He added, “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve done that so much where you set up the main story for the main characters. And then Kathy, to her credit, she was like, ‘Yeah, you did that for us in the Bourne movie.’ I was like, ‘Yeah. But let me think about it.’ And then I went home and kind of thought about it. I thought, ‘You know what, I gotta do this. I gotta do it.’ And then when I called them to let them know I wanted to do it, he said, ‘Actually, we’re changing it up, he’s in the whole movie now. It’s gonna be really cool.'”
