Semantic Coherence: A24 – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

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May 19, 2026
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Weeping Bleeding Hearts with David Lowery & Anne Hathaway

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A deep dive into the transformative experience of bringing Mother Mary to life with director David Lowery and Anne Hathaway.

Topics covered include: Deep collaboration, early drafts of Mother Mary, being quick to discard dialogue, finding inspiration in the Faroe Islands, Anne's fear of making the easy choice, the qualities of being a Texas gentleman, the touchstone records that the cast listened to on set from Ke$ha to St. Vincent, Anne’s intensive pre-production process, David offering a special live reading from the Mother Mary script, dance as a monologue, feeling truly transformed as a person after completing the film, bleeding hearts, and praise for Nick Cave.

David Lowery: Hi, I'm David Lowery.
Anne Hathaway: And I'm Anne Hathaway.
David Lowery: And this is the A24 podcast. And I've been doing a lot of podcasts lately, and wondering what it's like to be in the moderator seat, and I realize now that I don't like it.
Anne Hathaway: Does it feel different than being a director?
David Lowery: I feel I can get away with just, you've experienced this on set when I just unleash a slew of words that don't necessarily make sense but hopefully convey the emotion of what I'm trying to ask for. And I feel like I can't get away with that behind the microphone right now.
Anne Hathaway: Well, one of the things that I've experienced when I find that I'm in my favorite deep collaboration with a director is we get to a place where you don't have to say anything. I can feel when I'm acting how they feel about a take, and then they'll come out from behind the monitor and just kind of give me a look, and I raise my hand. Or they'll come over and put their head against my head and I feel like I'm downloaded. And anyway, all this is to say, that doesn't work in a podcast.
David Lowery: It doesn't work in podcasts.
Anne Hathaway: You and I just touch heads for half an hour.
David Lowery: Yeah, exactly. That sounds cool.
Anne Hathaway: And everyone's like, "Well."
David Lowery: Yeah, it sounds like an experience.
Anne Hathaway: But I felt that that was our thing on this one. I felt like you and Michaela connected over the power of the words, you both being writers. And I felt that given, and we've talked about this, given that Mother Mary is an emotionally inarticulate person, I actually found that it really hampered my ability to communicate while I was her. And I felt like Mother Mary's an expression of the part of you that sometimes finds it difficult to find your words. So between the two of us, we had no choice but to trust the wavelength.
David Lowery: Completely. I require those wavelengths to help me through life. I wish I could speak the way Sam does, and in writing that part and then witnessing the way Michaela played it, I was living a fantasy life, in which I could say exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment.
Anne Hathaway: But you can write the things.
David Lowery: I can write it. And if I was able to type this podcast out, it would be far more eloquent.
Anne Hathaway: I would have a lot of fun typing a podcast out with you. It'd be a different format.
David Lowery: Wouldn't that be neat to just sit here and just type and when the text could play out? And again, we'd be channeling an interesting wavelength that would be... You know what is interesting? I have been going back through old drafts of the script. I was looking for the very first one from 2019. I found when I started writing during COVID. And for some reason in this version, it was because I was going to the Pharaoh Islands for a different project, but I was like, "What if Sam's house is in the Pharaoh Islands?" I was very inspired by that landscape. But I don't know if it was because we were all wearing masks, it must have been, but I decided that in this iteration of the screenplay Sam's house had a vow of silence, and no one was allowed to speak. And she had custom index cards, or custom stationary. And the only communication was through the written word. And so it was all the same dialogue, but it had to flow differently because it was all taking the time to write it.
Anne Hathaway: The film also would've been 19 hours long.
David Lowery: Oh, that's why I stopped that version. That version made it all the way up to the dance scene.
Anne Hathaway: I do love that version. In my head, in my head. And I think I would like to see it in a museum.
David Lowery: It 100% was a museum piece.
Anne Hathaway: See, and actually, I have to say that just reminded me of something that I just treasure about you, and it came up earlier in a different conversation I was having with somebody else, about one of the reasons why you're so much fun to work with is that you are so inspired by your surroundings, and you have a certain type of joy in inspiration. Whereas in other experiences that I've been in, people aren't really allowed to make suggestions. On this one, you were just down to play. And somebody was talking about, they had an idea for a practical shot where they didn't want to walk and then five minutes later there was an apple box with wheels on it and you just leaned into it. And then I told the story about how we were trying... We had this elaborate rig for the red fabric, and it just wasn't quite working, and we thought we were going to have to use a computer. And we worked out that there would be a ring attached to a hidden undergarment, and that we would thread it through, and it wound up working.
David Lowery: It worked perfectly. There were so many instances.
Anne Hathaway: But you went with it. I just remember you had just such a like, "I'll give it a go. Yes. And let's see where this leads us." And you weren't bowed by the pressure of the shooting schedule. You were just so driven by this beautiful honoring of the creative impulse.
David Lowery: I find you can't do this on every movie, but this was a movie where I was always thinking any moment that we are in is the most important moment, and we have to see it through to its fullest. And if someone comes with an idea, bolt of inspiration out of the blue, we need to honor that. When you think about it from a production side, you always pay for something. It's like, okay, if we do this now, we're going to have to figure it out tomorrow. If we're going to spend two days on the scene, whatever we were supposed to shoot tomorrow is going to have to change.
But that's okay. We'll figure that out tomorrow. That's a tomorrow problem. Right now we are exploring together, and trying to find this ephemeral thing that we're after. And sometimes that is how did they do things a hundred years ago in silent films. And other times it's just trying to find the emotional voice of these moments that we were after, really trying to give those emotions the space they needed to really allow this movie in particular to manifest the way that it did, was really important to me.
Anne Hathaway: I'm actually curious, because now I'm trying to imagine the Pharaoh Islands version. And also I seem to remember a one draft Sam lived in a trailer. And Mother Mary broke through a window.
David Lowery: Sam's house had burned down, and while it was being rebuilt, she was living in a trailer outside. And yes, Sam and Mother Mary climbed in through the window.
Anne Hathaway: So I was wondering about that, because I've just spoken about how you're driven by this honoring of the creative spirit. You've written countless drafts of this from 2019 onward. Do you ever stop and think, "I'm asking too much of the audience"? Does that impact your North Star, or your vision for the movie? Or is it just you? Is it, "This isn't quite what I want to say"?
David Lowery: It's me. Almost always it's me. It's, how can I achieve clarity? How can I find... And I mean, it goes to the audience as well, because I'm thinking about how I would receive this movie if I were sitting in the dark, if I were not the one writing it. If I were an audience member, how would these things that I'm conceiving of arrive in my periphery? How would I take them in? How would I see it? And as roundabout as I may be in getting to the point, I always want to make sure that I'm clear and lucid. And that if someone is willing to see the answer right in front of them, that it is available to them. We are never trying to hide the ball with this film, or with any of my films. We are always trying to express something, maybe succinctly isn't quite the word, but it's true, in spirit. In spirit.
Anne Hathaway: That hasn't been my experience with the word.
David Lowery: No, it's not.
Anne Hathaway: No, no, but I love what you said about clarity keeps coming up. And I think to express something undeniable.
David Lowery: Yeah.
Anne Hathaway: Of the things that scared me the most once I charted my course for how I was going to play this character was I knew I was making a choice that not everybody would understand. And that was to play Mother Mary as so broken she didn't have any fight left in her. And I thought, "I know this is technically wrong. This is a wrong film choice to make. This is a two-hander. I've got to have more bounce, more fight, more spit, more vinegar, more all these things." But it felt like such a betrayal of where the character's actually at. And it was so scary to trust that the audience was going to have to wait over an hour into the movie before they understood what was really going on with her, and that what they have seen will actually drop to another level, and it will be earned.
But it was really hard believing that the audience would grace her what they needed to grace her. And I just knew that I would be asking the audience to watch Mother Mary kind of just get annihilated by Sam for the first 45 minutes of the movie. And thank goodness for Michaela Coel who made it so entertaining.
David Lowery: It's entertaining, but...
Anne Hathaway: That actually is a pleasure watching a pop star get humiliated like that.
David Lowery: I think I'm a big believer in the idea that all of the implicit elements of the movie are there from frame one. And so even if the audience doesn't know the actual events that led to Mother Mary's state when we meet her, there is a sense of– Well, there's I think a great deal of empathy for her, because we've seen where she came from, and we see where she is when she gets to Sam's house. And in the ellipsis between those two moments, we are invited to wonder what may have happened. And I think that you were so– I remember watching you walk up the stairs in the barn the first time, and I realized how that was going to play once we understood why what happened, but also just seeing that by itself was heartbreaking. Just seeing this person that we– Again, I'm projecting on set right now, but when I'm there, watching that happen, knowing that we'll have 20 minutes earlier seen you on stage as an utter rockstar, I naturally gravitate towards, yes, questions, but also a tremendous amount of just sorrow, that she has found herself in this place. And curiosity comes second. Curiosity about what that actually was is secondary to the empathy.
Anne Hathaway: I think that what I'm connecting to is just the fear of not making the easy choice that would've sort of let some of the tension for the audience and said, "This is familiar." Yes, you're watching two people, these two women engaging gamesmanship, but that would've felt like a betrayal of the screenplay to me, because you didn't write a game. Mother Mary's not playing a game, she's fighting for her life. And she's past the point of mounting any kind of defense or offense. She's just so storm tossed.
And so I guess what I'm getting at is, I had such faith in your artistry, and your vision, and that you were going to bring the whole thing home, that I was able to take that leap that felt very scary for me to not, like I said, to not make the choice that I know would've put a lot of people, or what I imagine a lot of audience members at ease. We weren't making a series of little moments. We were making a whole film.
David Lowery: Yeah. I remember writing the screenplay and realizing I could end the film at a certain point, and that would yield a movie that would be very enjoyable in which we could engage in that rat-tat banter that, the potential is there for that, but I wanted to push further and I wanted the movie to dig deeper. And as a result, the potential for that is, it's always there, but that's not what the movie's about. And the great joy of this movie was that we knew that we were heading towards something deeper. And every time that it felt like it might veer in that direction, we could enjoy it when it did. There's some moments in the movie where I just am in utter heaven watching you and Michaela go back and forth when the rhythm picks up, but that's not this movie. It's inclusive of that, but it's going so much further than that.
I remember the moment very clearly when I was writing it and just thinking like, "I'm writing what could be the ending of the movie right now." And I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it, but Michaela, I turned that into a monologue that Michaela gives, and realizing this is not the ending, this is the midpoint.
Anne Hathaway: I have a question, because I've spoken to you about how I've felt transformed by this experience as a person, as a performer, as a collaborator, and an artist. I'm sure you find yourself transformed by all the films that you make. And so I'm curious, how precisely has Mother Mary transformed you?
David Lowery: I think I might be able to give a better answer to that after I've made one more movie and seen the ways in which it's manifested, but it's made me much more considerate.
Anne Hathaway: Really?
David Lowery: Yeah. I mean, I've liked to think of myself as an empathetic director.
Anne Hathaway: Yes, you're a Texas gentleman.
David Lowery: And yet I think there's a point... Well, let me think of how to say this. I've always hidden behind the camera. I like to be close to my cast. I like to be collaborating with them right up close, but I like the camera to also be very close. So we're usually all together, and my comfort zone is behind the camera. And I love picking out lenses, I love designing shots, I love blocking choreography. And with this movie, I wanted to share in the experience that you and Michaela were having, and participate in that, and learn from that. And I don't know what it was like from your perspective, but I always felt like whether it was a literal circle on the floor, or a metaphorical one that we were still cocooned within, I always felt like I was participating in that exchange of energy on set, and feeling it, and understanding your process, both of your processes in a way that I've never have on any

May 6, 2026
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Thirty Thousand Square Feet with Kane Parsons & James Wan

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Step into the Backrooms with director Kane Parsons and legendary horror director and producer James Wan.

Topics covered include: Kane's parents keeping him off the internet until age eight, pirating way too much software, the origin of the Backrooms, the purgatories we build for ourselves, meeting your heroes after early virality, building 30,000 sq. ft. of sets on a soundstage, Kane accidentally calling his film a "product" and immediately wanting to flee to the woods, shotlisting an entire feature in Blender, renting out a Vancouver theater to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey during prep, James Wan's hopeful advice for young filmmakers, Renate's spiritual curiosity, control variables, and bringing the family together for the theatrical premiere of Backrooms.

James Wan: Hello there. I am James Wan.
Kane Parsons: And I'm Kane Parsons.
James Wan: And you're listening to the A24 podcast. Kane, buddy, how are you, man?
Kane Parsons: I'm doing well. How are you doing, James?
James Wan: Yeah, good, good. I'm well as well. So we're here to talk about all things Backrooms and everything related to it and yourself, obviously.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. I have a lot I can say. It's been pretty all-consuming like four-ish years or so now.
James Wan: It's been a pretty long journey for you from, I guess, from where you started with the shorts, right?
Kane Parsons: Yeah.
James Wan: The first short, all the way to now, the full-on proper feature film version of it.
Kane Parsons: Yep. Yeah.
James Wan: It's been quite the journey.
Kane Parsons: It has changed in ways that I definitely did not expect when I initially posted that short. And I mean, you were present at the very beginning of that. I think, if I'm not mistaken, the first time we met, it was over Zoom, and I think you were in post on Aquaman 2.
James Wan: Right. That sounds right.
Kane Parsons: And you walked in and you were eating a salad and you said, "Hello." And we talked for one or two minutes, and you stepped out. But I think that was the first time we met.
James Wan: That was the first time we met via Zoom.
Kane Parsons: Yes.
James Wan: And I was eating a salad, or whatever.
Kane Parsons: It’s seared into my brain.
James Wan: That's funny.
Kane Parsons: It's forever my-
James Wan: That's cool. But then we met in person when you came out to LA to visit us on the set of Night Swim.
Kane Parsons: Yeah.
James Wan: I can't remember what year was that.
Kane Parsons: It was 2023.
James Wan: 2023. Okay.
Kane Parsons: 2023. So just three years ago, exactly today.
James Wan: Three years ago. And how old were you when you came to visit us?
Kane Parsons: I would've been 17.
James Wan: 17. Wow.
Kane Parsons: 17, yeah.
James Wan: Amazing. So I definitely have a lot of questions I want to ask you. And I guess the best place to possibly start is let's go all the way back. Take us back. I would actually go back beyond what you were doing that led you to your interest in making shorts, in filmmaking in general. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your history there, your passion and what kind of got you into all of this.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. I mean, I try my best to trace it. So I'm sure there's some things that are like results of random subconscious, of course. There's going to be some noise to it that I can't quite pick up, but I know that I've always had a tendency or a bias since childhood to go towards something, a version of creativity in some way. And I've had an upbringing that did not directly disable that desire. It was like I was able to find ways to do it mostly through... I was drawing growing up quite a bit. That was a big thing I would spend a lot of time doing and that would turn into like ... I eventually got an old digicam camera and I would go and do a little stop-motion animation with Lego. And I don't think it was a particularly unique start in that way. It's a pretty common, I guess, activity as a kid when you want to go in that direction. I remember probably by around the time I was like nine or so, I had... The term filmmaker was a thing, or director was in my brain enough that I was like, "Yeah, I like movies. I want to make movies. That's cool." I didn't have a lot of access to the internet until I was around like eight or nine or so.
James Wan: Right. Because your parents were keeping you away from the internet?
Kane Parsons: Yeah, they were smart.
James Wan: Okay. But it sounds to me like they were very supportive of the kind of things that you were into, right?
Kane Parsons: Yeah.
James Wan: Yeah. And the fact, like you said, that they didn't hold you back and they just kind of let you experiment and play and basically just explore your creativity. So it sounds to me like you were drawn to things that were of the visual arts. You were definitely attracted to visual things-
Kane Parsons: Yeah, visuals, my brain is very strictly visual most of the time. Usually, words are visuals in my head rather than actual sounds and stuff. So it's usually very, just visuals-
James Wan: So you see things in your head.
Kane Parsons: Very, very clearly. But I can't-
James Wan: And you try to get it out somehow.
Kane Parsons: For some reason, I can't do written language in my head, but I can only do visuals. So I kind of have a lot of that.
James Wan: I totally get it.
Kane Parsons: Quite a bit.
James Wan: Yeah. That's super cool.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. So I know that around that time I had PlayStation 3 and I was very into... I got into Minecraft for my friends, and there was this game, LittleBigPlanet. These are sandbox games where you can have a lot of create functions. And so I was exploring what it's like to create something under the guise of technically a 3D program, even though it's inside of a game engine, and it's like oriented as a game. I was sort of like getting the feeling for like, "Oh, look, I can make a thing and then other people come in and interact with this thing and then I can kind of upscale the feeling of like, I want to curate this experience more and more." And nothing about this was grand or hyper compelling because I was like 9 and 10 and none of this was-
James Wan: Wow. Okay. So you were doing all this around 9 or 10-ish years old.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. But I guess what I like is it's no different than what I think most of my peers were doing. Even people who don't have a desire to go into art fields, it was like building stuff in Minecraft Creative Mode was very like…
James Wan: It was just playing for you guys. You were just playing basically, right?
Kane Parsons: It was playing, and I would take it a little more seriously, probably where I would come up with super contrived rules for some random sub-game we wanted to play or something. And then it was simultaneously watching a lot of VFX-driven work on YouTube, like independent YouTubers, like Corridor Crew sort of stuff, encouraging people to just like, "Hey, anyone can kind of..." With the right software—you don't even need good hardware for it—and just like a simple camera, you can do rudimentary VFX work. And I kind of got a bit of an appetite for that. And then I pirated way too much software and got a bunch of viruses, and technically doing some filmmaking stuff on my parents' phone. And it was kind of like game-oriented largely. I was really into-
James Wan: You know what? This is actually good to talk about because what it does show is your journey to become a filmmaker actually went down two paths, right? You were shooting stuff, you were making little things on the side, but also like you were saying, your brain of being into the technical, the computing side of things, that then also informs the way you make your little shorts, right?
Kane Parsons: Yeah.
James Wan: Yeah. So you understand the computing aspect of filmmaker of just storytelling in general and how you would use that to inform the kind of stuff that you would make. And so that became a big part of what you did, right? A big part of like all that sort of computer language and programming and understanding that you have that and sort of using that as the visual effects sort of backbones to what you were making your shorts with. And so I think that's really interesting that you didn't actually necessarily go down the path of, "Hey, I want to be a video game maker." But you sort of stuck to storytelling, filmmaking, but using the craft that you had, the passion and you had learned, acquired to kind of assist you in your filmmaking.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. I mean, I definitely ... It was around the beginning of middle school that's when I was getting the software and trying out After Effects for the first time and was doing a bunch of tutorials. And it was mostly like project-based where I would get excited about a scene or a visual or a moment in my head that I wanted to see exist, but there was nothing surrounding it, supporting that moment. So it was like, "Okay, so now I've got to learn how to do these things so I can make that moment. So I got to learn this software, and also like I need to learn how to edit it properly so I can put the right kind of reverb on this music that I'm hearing. And now I'm going to need to build a whole little short film around this moment, just so it makes sense in a context." And then that was kind of like, not accidentally, but I kind of just went through the process a few times with a few different short films when I was ... Again, these things are not on YouTube for a reason. I've privated them. But I was definitely pretty active doing stuff in any free time I could get. It was like the only thing I would do starting in like end of elementary school, it just became a pretty laser-focused sort of obsession. And I think once I really felt like I was getting the hang of After Effects and like the 3D tools available to me in there and taking advantage of some student licenses and stuff, then that just kind of became an addiction. And I was like, only using-
James Wan: But you enjoy it, right?
Kane Parsons: Oh, yeah.
James Wan: You enjoy using these programs.
Kane Parsons: It's so much fun.
James Wan: It's so funny because I started using After Effects in high school, and I started using it because it was part of my school program and stuff like that, but I kind of got bored of it. I enjoyed the technical stuff of filmmaking and doing stuff like this, but I got to a certain point where I'm like, "This is just too much for me. I just want to get out there. I just want to get out there and just shoot from the hip and just become a bit more running gun." I found the process a little bit too, the technical side sometimes a little bit too limiting, at least for me, but clearly you enjoyed it, and you embraced it.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. It's because I think I have a hard time with uncontrollable variables and whatnot. So I think that, for me, I enjoy a certain level of run-and-gun, but I think I am the kind of person who needs to know every single thing about the thing I'm making before...
James Wan: Fair enough.
Kane Parsons: ... any other people are even involved with it or before anything else even... before there's a chance for something to get away from me.
James Wan: You know what, that's a really good trait for a director to have, to be well-prepared.
Kane Parsons: Yeah, of course. But I think, because I was a kid in middle school, I was doing filmmaking, but it wasn't, like, serious. It was inherently there was a joke component to what I was doing, but it was like-
James Wan: Yeah, you're just playing around.
Kane Parsons: I was playing around.
James Wan: It wasn't a career path yet at that point, right?
Kane Parsons: Correct. I wasn't thinking about it in that way. I did a few local level film festivals around that time and so part of my brain was definitely thinking about it in that way, but I was still thinking like, "Okay, time to go through high school and then I'll go to college for film school and then I don't know what happens after that, but I'll probably make movies," like some vague notion of that.
James Wan: So let's talk about that. How in your journey did all of that, what you just stated there, lead you to your very first short with Backrooms? I'm sure you made a lot of other stuff before that, but how did all this lead to Backrooms?
Kane Parsons: It was the beginning of the pandemic. I got into Blender. I started teaching myself Blender. I was fortunate enough to have a situation where I was just locked at home, and I was doing Zoom classes, and I was able to sort of-
James Wan: So this was 2020?
Kane Parsons: 2020.
James Wan: And how old were you?
Kane Parsons: I was 14.
James Wan: Okay.
Kane Parsons: I was getting into Blender. Maybe I didn't mention it earlier. I'm a big fan of the Valve properties like Portal and Half-Life, and those majorly informed a lot of my creative sensibilities, I think, growing up. And that was around the time Half-Life: Alyx was coming out, and I was wanting to do fan art for that, and that got me really motivated to figure some stuff out in Blender. And then I did some things, and then I was like, "Wait a minute, now I just kind of know how to use Blender." And so I could start...Within like two weeks or so, Blender's really intuitive. When you're young and near software, you're able to kind of pick it up through osmosis kind of like quickly, but I do think it's just genuinely, they've streamlined the software in such a way that it is like very accessible. But I started doing that. I made a few films again that year, but then by 2021, I had gotten back into Attack on Titan, which is obviously a pretty big property around the world. And I was basically adapting set pieces from that into found footage, but it was in like 1930s, 1940s war film footage of like set pieces inside that world. And that was when my channel actually took off.
James Wan: Okay, wait, hang on. You were creating images for that, but just inventing, making them up through Blender or whatever program you were using.
Kane Parsons: Yeah. What I was doing is, because it's an anime and manga...
James Wan: And so this was like a fan kind of like short or whatever.
Kane Parsons: A fan project. So it was an anime and manga, and what I was doing was like a series of these videos. Well, I did one thinking it was going to be one, but then people lost their minds over it. So I started doing more, but it was like basically, what would an actual honest perspective into that world look like if it was somehow real? So just like what does a scarier, more realistic approach of just viewing this thing look like. And so that's what I put out using Blender. So it's all things from the series, but just through a slightly different lens.
James Wan: But was it still animation, like 2D animation?

April 14, 2026
[H2]
Endless Grasping with Ali Wong & Oscar Isaac

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A brief but brilliant ceremonial passing of the Beef baton between Season 1 star Ali Wong and Season 2 star Oscar Isaac.

Topics covered include: NPR podcast voice, evangelical upbringings, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin's incredible observations of things that are both really painful and really funny, little mullets, Ali's love of Ex Machina, parallel play, the impressive amount of bodily fluids in Beef, Oscar first meeting Carey Mulligan on set of Drive, getting to play really bad people, going down a YouTube rabbit hole to learn how people respond to psychedelic toad venom, the intricacies of staging a masturbation scene, Ali competing for roles with Stanley Tucci, and Sonny’s trick of taking you to Korea so you have nobody to complain to.

Ali Wong: Are we supposed to introduce ourselves? And do we do it to the camera? This one. Hi, I'm Ali Wong.
Oscar Isaac: Hi, I'm Oscar Isaac.
Ali Wong: And this is —
Oscar Isaac: The A24 Podcast. I'm using my podcast voice.
Ali Wong: You sure are. Very NPR of you. Very non-threatening.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah, I'm non-threatening.
Ali Wong: Very cozy cardigan. Very—
Oscar Isaac: Mm-hmm, with my little cloud drink.
Ali Wong: Yeah. So Oscar, I don't even know. I just assume that people who are movie stars don't watch TV because it's beneath you. So, I was surprised that you were a fan of Beef and that you watched it. So how did you even come on to Season 1?
Oscar Isaac: Well, everybody was talking about it. I remember watching the first two episodes and just loving it. And then I have children that don't let me watch anything, so then I didn't get to finish it. It was one of those where I was like, "I've got to finish that." And then I'd gotten a call from Sonny about a new season.
Ali Wong: Oh, nice.
Oscar Isaac: And so I was like, "Well, now I got to finish it." And I loved it. And it was so funny because I already liked it from those first two, but then in that third episode it takes such a turn emotionally. When Steven's at the church and the song is playing and he starts crying. And yeah, I was—
Ali Wong: You know what's funny about that? So in that scene where he starts crying, we were all at dinner together, and I was like, "Oh my God, Steven, I just watched that scene." And he was like, "Oh yeah." And I was like, "It's so funny." And he was like, "No, it's not." And I was like, "Yeah, it is, man." I was like, "It's hilarious how you just start ... How you're like that, and you just start crying." And he was like, "I don't—"
Oscar Isaac: And can't stop.
Ali Wong: Yeah. And then he was like, "I didn't think it was ... I really don't see it or whatever." And then I was so uncomfortable, and I went to go to the bathroom at this Korean barbecue place. I was like, "Oh my God, did I offend Steven?" But then, thereafter, a lot of people ... And then he sort of embraced it. But because he was so committed, that's why it worked.
Oscar Isaac: Of course.
Ali Wong: Because he can't judge it and think that that scene is funny.
Oscar Isaac: It reminds me of, I remember when I was doing Inside Llewyn Davis and whenever I would—
Ali Wong: Which I just saw recently.
Oscar Isaac: Oh, yeah? Nice. Well, when I would do—
Ali Wong: So good. So, so good.
Oscar Isaac: Thank you. When I would do a scene, and if I thought of it, I was like, "Oh, this scene's pretty funny." I would do it, and there wouldn't be much of a reaction. But whenever I was most in pain, the Cohens would just be cracking up. And so there's just something about that.
Ali Wong: Yeah, I think that commitment where it is so, you do take it seriously. And the part of you that can connect to taking it seriously is like that's what makes it work.
Oscar Isaac: For sure. I mean, I think it's also like Sonny's tone, right? The fact that that is happening, which is very real, but surrounded by all this hyper-Christian praise music that's happening at the same time. And I grew up in an evangelical Christian world. And so it also, I found it very funny from that standpoint as well, and like the youth groups and the Christian rock and all that. But it is what I loved so much about talking to Sonny about this one, too this Beef, is his incredible observations of things that are both really painful and really funny and like the absurdity and in a way the compassion with how small people can be.
Ali Wong: Yeah. It was so… I mean, Season 2 is so great. You're so great in it. You're so funny. I mean—
Oscar Isaac: That means a lot coming from you.
Ali Wong: You're so, so funny. I mean, everyone knows you're funny from ... I think, what do you think ... I think it's when I watched Ex Machina, that's kind of when I got put on to like, I was like, "Oh, this dude's so, so funny in addition to being a great actor." When you're wearing that fur vest, and you're having the time of your life, and then the joy just drained so quickly. Like you go up and you go down, and then you're like down about being down. There were just like a lot of really ... And you have like a real menace to you too, which is such a fun part of Beef too, because in a way, like you're not really like a gangster, but everyone in Beef gets to be a bad person and it's so fun. So, how much did you ideate with Sonny over your character before?
Oscar Isaac: Well, I'm curious about you too, because I mean for you, the transition too from standup into something like this, like what that was like for you. And I was very curious, going into this, this role in Beef that you had was like so massive and asked so much of you how that transition worked for you and what your conversations with Sonny were like. So I want to hear about that, but I'll answer you about this, it was like a courtship. Remember, I was doing Frankenstein at the same time and we would have these—
Ali Wong: Oh, he’d get so excited when he calls.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah, and we'd have two and a half hour conversations that I would cry.
Ali Wong: I know.
Oscar Isaac: We would go really deep. If I read anything from a self-help book recently, I'd be like, "Hey, I just read this." And we would just go down that path together. Incredibly open about his own life, which encouraged me to be open about mine, which was strange with somebody I'd never met other than just on Zoom. And so his sensibility is really what won me over because at that time I think there was maybe one episode and even that episode wasn't quite there yet. There were some ideas, but it was out of those conversations where I thought this, "he's got his beat on something and he's really funny and we connect so much on just the spiritual journey of getting into middle age."
Ali Wong: Yeah. I mean, he really asks ... I mean, you've seen those tie-dye t-shirts with the Ram Dass quotes that he wears. He's a very spiritual person. And so it sort of begs of you to really be vulnerable and open up with him personally in those conversations. And then it's really interesting what he extracts and extrapolates from there to your character. And then it's kind of the best version of co-creating with somebody. But there were times where, like for some of the scenes, I wasn't used to memorizing that amount of dialogue.
Oscar Isaac: Do you memorize your stand-up routines?
Ali Wong: I do, but I write all of it. And so with some of the dialogue, I was like ... I remember there was one day we did like ... Because we had a lot of time constraints and I said to him, I was like, "I can't do this in one take. I know you want to do it in one take, but I just can't do it." And he was like, "I think you can do it." And then he was like, "We got to go." And then that was it. And then I kind of just didn't have a choice to think about it too much. And I'm not the kind of person to go back and forth with him because it exhausts me. So I'm like, "All right—"
Oscar Isaac: Mm-hmm, you try to fight it. Yeah.
Ali Wong: To try to fight it. And I see, I think that's a lot of people's process because it's like in that they understand more, or ... I don't really know. I don't really relate to that. I just am like, "I'll go where you tell me and I'll do whatever you say." And then I just kind of say the words, but we also just didn't have time because—
Oscar Isaac: Right, right, it was the first one—
Ali Wong: So I think that was really a blessing because I just didn't have time to think about it.
Oscar Isaac: Overthink it.
Ali Wong: Was it like that for you—
Oscar Isaac: It's the enemy, is the overthinking.
Ali Wong: ... on your first big project? Where you did a ...
Oscar Isaac: I mean, I was so hungry to get an opportunity coming out of drama school that I think when I got it, I just was like, "This is everything. This is going to be my Dog Day Afternoon."
Ali Wong: And what was that?
Oscar Isaac: This was a movie ... Scott Burns, a good buddy of mine says, he's a great writer and it was the first film that he directed. It was called Pu-239, which is like a plutonium isotope. And I was like playing this Russian gangster trying to sell plutonium on the black market.
Ali Wong: Oh, yeah. And you're like, "This is very important."
Oscar Isaac: Yeah, yeah, this is it.
Ali Wong: This is going to change the world.
Oscar Isaac: It might change the world. Yeah, exactly.
Ali Wong: Yeah, mm-hmm.
Oscar Isaac: So yeah, yeah. And I can be an overthinker and like to talk about things and like to try things and question everything. Like, "It says I come in through the door, but why don't I come in through the window? How come I don't come in through the… Why doesn’t…" So that all the possibilities collapse to the only thing it can be.
Ali Wong: I see.
Oscar Isaac: That's kind of fun for me, you know?
Ali Wong: Yeah, I get it —
Oscar Isaac: And in fact, figuring out what it is usually kind of a bummer because then it means all the other possibilities—
Ali Wong: All that is gone.
Oscar Isaac: ... gone. I like when it might be anything, it could be this, it could be that, it could be this.
Ali Wong: Did you collaborate a lot on your wardrobe? Because I found your wardrobe… so subtle—
Oscar Isaac: Well, it was—
Ali Wong: But that's another thing about Beef, it's very subtly funny, the wardrobe. Like Carey's wardrobe cracked me up, too.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah. Yeah, the wardrobe is—
Ali Wong: She was wearing these coordinated linen suits that had embroidered little dumb things on them and then your wardrobe was like, it was just so coded and still ... Oh, okay. What did it say to you?
Oscar Isaac: Well, Olga's incredible.
Ali Wong: Yeah, she's amazing.
Oscar Isaac: She's astounding and she's so funny and subtle as well. But before that, the first place I started with was the hair. And I worked with somebody named Tim Nolan who was incredible. And the first thing I do is, "Okay, what's his head going to look like? You're going to see a lot of this head. What are we doing?" And we landed on this little mullet.
Ali Wong: Uh-huh, yeah. It's the most—
Oscar Isaac: It's the tiniest rebellion. You know? Of trying to hold onto something.
Ali Wong: To youth. Yeah, to that—
Oscar Isaac: Exactly. To youth, and to like "Hey, man, I know I'm a country club manager—
Ali Wong: A cool guy.
Oscar Isaac: ... but you know man, I'm a cool guy."
Ali Wong: That was really riding that line, it followed through with the whole wardrobe.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah, exactly. So that was really important. And since sometimes we would take our cues off of Sonny of what he was wearing and the Crocs and the oversized sweaters and playing with that idea and also what the suits looked like. And we wanted the suit to look like it's something that he wants to look good in, but he doesn't want to look like an agent or something and he wears the Oura ring as well and all these little things that kind of create—
Ali Wong: He's really trying to still have it all.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great thing I heard recently, which I feel like kind of encompasses Josh. I heard someone say, "You can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want." And I think the show is a lot about people trying to have everything they want. You know? And it's just endless grasping, endless grasping.
Ali Wong: Yeah. Just even when he's talking to the ... Who's the guy who's super rich at the club who has the private—
Oscar Isaac: Troy, yeah. Bill Fichtner.
Ali Wong: When he's talking to Troy, and you're still trying to have everything and you're like not even ... I mean, Troy plays it really well, but you're not reading the room. Whereas before your character's so sensitive, you're so desperate that it's like you can't read his… this clear sign that something's off.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah. Yeah. The desperation overtakes all of that, the fear and all that.
Ali Wong: What was it like working with Carey again after all these years? Because I had just ... Bill showed me Inside Llewyn Davis, because I'd never seen it before. And I was like, "This is amazing." And you hadn't worked with her since then, right?
Oscar Isaac: I hadn't worked with her ... We worked together on a movie called Drive.
Ali Wong: Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oscar Isaac: Which was way, way... That was the first time I had met her and we were both still in our 20s and ...
Ali Wong: You guys are a couple?
Oscar Isaac: In Drive?
Ali Wong: Yeah. Oh no, you're not.
Oscar Isaac: In Drive, we are.
Ali Wong: Right, but then you die.
Oscar Isaac: Yes.
Ali Wong: So fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oscar Isaac: I'm in prison and then her and Ryan Gosling kind of get together. And so we were like young and Hollywood and just things were starting to open up and it was amazing to meet her at that moment. And then years later, Inside Llewyn Davis, and I had met my significant other, she had met her significant other, Marcus, and we were just newly in love and this big role and about music. And so that was amazing to meet at that point. And then now to come together again.
Ali Wong: Is it true that you also auditioned for that at the very last minute?
Oscar Isaac: For Llewyn Davis?
Ali Wong: Yeah. Like, they had already decided ... A decision had been made.
Oscar Isaac: They hadn't decided yet, but they were—
Ali Wong: Okay, I had heard that a decision had been made.
Oscar Isaac: Well they were getting close, I think.
Ali Wong: And then you came in and they weren't really familiar with you.
Oscar Isaac: Yeah, no, I hadn't done a read before.
Ali Wong: And then after you sang and you had auditioned, they were like, "Oh no, we don't have a choice."
Oscar Isaac: Well, they didn't tell me that part.
Ali Wong: That's what I've heard.
Oscar Isaac: That's funny. Yeah. No, I mean, the character was designed on Dave Van Ronk, who was a 6'5", 200-pound Swede. But anyway, yeah, so then we met on that after we hav