Play It Again: Actor Oscar Isaac

On the heels of Beef S2 https://www.netflix.com/title/81447461, we're revisiting a favorite of ours with actor Oscar Isaac. We begin with his 2023 Broadway debut in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (5:10), the play's timeless writing (6:55), and the legacy of the great Lorraine Hansberry (11:27). Then, Isaac reflects on growing up in the early ‘80s (12:47), his punk-rock salad days in high school (18:05) and then Juilliard (27:45), and the inspiration behind his breakout role in Inside Llewyn Davis (30:54). On the back-half, we discuss grieving through Hamlet (36:54), a guiding piece of poetry from Jeremy Strong (39:49), the pre-show ritual he continues today (41:09), a formative Bible passage (45:57), and how he embraces the present moment (50:57). Original air date: June 11, 2023 Subscribe to our new YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@talkeasypod. As always, our email: [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam for GoSo. Welcome to the show.

• 0:32Sam Fragoso?

  Today, I am joined by actor Oscar Isaac. You've likely seen him in films like A Most Violent Year, Ex Machina, The Card Counter, and Dune. Or maybe you've seen him on television in shows like Moon Night or Scenes from a Marriage. But before this remarkable run, Isaac was a young, hustling actor in New York City, trying to make a name for himself. As he joked during his recent SNL monologue, "I'm half Guatemalan, half Cuban," or, as casting directors call that, "ethnically ambiguous." So it's no surprise then that Isaac's first leading man opportunity

• 1:12Sam Fragoso?

  came from a pair of filmmakers who've built a career just outside the mainstream Hollywood system. It was in 2013 that brothers Joel and Ethan Cohen hired Isaac to play the titular character of Inside Llewyn Davis. The film, set in Greenwich Village circa 1961, spans a week in the life of a talented but uncompromising folk singer who can't seem to get out of his own way. Isaac has returned to that same time and place, this time onstage, in a new production of The Sign and Cindy Brustein's Window, written by the late seminal playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Set in the apartment of couple Iris and Sidney Brustein,

• 1:55Sam Fragoso?

  Isaac plays what Hansberry once described as a nervous, ulcerated banjo-making young man, and whom I see in embodiment of a certain kind of Greenwich Village intellectual. As for today, I wanted to talk to Oscar about making his Broadway debut with the prescient political writing of Lorraine Hansberry. We also get into his childhood in Florida, finding creativity early, his punk rock salad days in high school, then Juilliard, and how each of those eras shaped the heart and spirit of the work that followed. This is Oscar Isaac.

• 2:50Sam Fragoso?

  Oscar Isaac.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Hi, Sam.

• 2:51Sam Fragoso?

  Pleasure to meet you.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Nice to meet you, too.

• 2:53Sam Fragoso?

  How are you feeling?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Right in this moment?

• 2:55Sam Fragoso?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  A little bit warm, a little sweaty.

• 2:57Sam Fragoso?

  I know you see me sweating.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I don't actually see you sweating.

• 2:59Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, yeah, that's cool.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  I see a little bit on the hairline there.

• 3:01Sam Fragoso?

  Thanks for noticing.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  You're welcome. And, you know, voice is a little raggedy.

• 3:06Sam Fragoso?

  You been busy, or?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  I've been a little busy, been using it a lot. Four weeks left of this run on Broadway. We'll have done this show for six months now.

• 3:16Sam Fragoso?

  You started doing the show back in February, right at BAM?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:20Sam Fragoso?

  So we're sitting maybe less than a mile away from the James Earl Jones Theater.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:27Sam Fragoso?

  You're at the tail end of what's been a great run. Mentally, how are you doing?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  It's taken on a liturgical quality.

• 3:37Sam Fragoso?

  No, I didn't have that word written down. Nope.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  It's like public worship. It's very ritualized at this point. It's unlike any experience I've ever had. It's the longest I've ever done anything. You know, I've done every moment of the three hour play badly for myself. I've done every moment well, as I make air quotes. And so, and not to say that I can't be surprised. I am surprised every night by things, but in a way, it's like my own motivations, my own personal wants and desires for what doing a play and doing this part and what I wanted to be. I've experienced those all. So now it's really just the doing in a kind of disinterested way, but not uninterested, but disinterested, meaning that my own personal things aren't as necessary

• 4:24Speaker 01

  as just the getting up and the ritual of doing it with faith in the author and the play itself. But it's a weird process. It's humbling, you know, to kind of surrender to it.

• 4:35Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I want to get into the things that got you into this play in the first place, as distant as they may seem now, because the play is written by the late, great Lorraine Hansberry. It was the last production she mounted on Broadway before passing away in 1965. Since then, it's been pretty infrequently revisited. But when you first discovered the play, you said that you felt a profound freedom reading it. A lot of the things she talks about, our place in the world as artists, as human beings, and as activists, spoke to me. It was like an exorcising of a lot of fear and demons and shame.

• 5:15Sam Fragoso?

  So, specific to this production, what are or were those fears and demons that you were trying to expel through this performance?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Hmm. I think it's about, you know, there's something about the idea of public transgression. There's something about saying the wrong things in search of the right thing, which there isn't a whole lot of room nowadays to do. And I think. Art and the theater is a place where that is still possible, although it takes doing a play from 60 years ago to be able to really feel like speaking the unspeakable, saying the unsayable, doing the thing that one shouldn't do. There's a real catharsis in doing that publicly for a greater good, to understand something deeper. And I think there was just something about

• 6:09Speaker 01

  this character who says very misogynistic things, blindly racist things sometimes. You see him at his smallest, but also you see him, a human at their most expansive as well, all in the course of the play. And I think that that's true for all of the characters. And it's really unusual. It's unusual to read a play like that, or read a play that's that's that bold, hard on its sleeve, maybe because she knew the end was near, just needed to get it all out there, every last thing that she wanted to get out there and put it in a play and find the way that it would be the most provocative in some ways, too. And there's just something that feels really invigorating about performing that.

• 6:47Sam Fragoso?

  The play really does have that. And one more thing, kind of quality to it. It's like, I'm leaving the party. I know the end is near. She would end up dying of pancreatic cancer, I think at the age of 34. And it does seem like she's getting a lot off her chest. I'm curious about the first thing you said, which was, "It takes a play from the 60s to talk about the present." Why do you think that is?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think that this kind of unbridled fearlessness with which she approaches incredibly sensitive topics, and especially right now in our time, you know, things that we're grappling with, but also grappling with how to talk about them, you know? And I think there's a lot of fear about saying the wrong thing, about being dismissed, about being ostracized.

• 7:40Sam Fragoso?

  Is that something you fear?

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Me, not as much because I don't operate personally in the public sphere so much. If that makes sense, you know, like I try to like, I do my job and I go home and I'm with my family. But with as much connection and as much availability to say whatever you want and get it out there, there's a lot more fear with that about saying the wrong thing, about me being misconstrued, and then also knowing that the algorithm is such that it feeds negative bias that we don't actually have already, right? Which is like, you know, you focus in on the negative stuff, not so much the positive stuff. So I think because of that, that world that we're living in, this kind of unbridled intercourse with these kinds of subjects is much, much more rare. And things tend to toe a very clear line, generally, whether it be on the right or the left, or whatever it is.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And what she does in this play, you know, she is a total activist and a Marxist to a certain extent. She's a black queer woman, writing in 64, which is like the most antagonistic time for a black queer woman to be writing, especially for Broadway. And yet, there is such kind of bold-faced courage in standing up. And I remember I read a transcript of an interview for 60 Minutes that never aired that she did with Mike Wallace. And it is one of the most infuriating, condescending, misogynist, racist things that you could possibly... And to have her just stand there and parry everything that he says and not fall into his traps, and no wonder it never aired. You know, she makes him look like an idiot.

• 9:07Sam Fragoso?

  Well, that sounds exactly like Mike Wallace, so...

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a harrowing thing to read. You can't even believe it.

• 9:15Sam Fragoso?

  You know, when the play came out, Hansberry wrote in The New York Times in October of 64, she wrote, "That she, and by extension the play, became obsessed with the problem of political commitment in general, the problem being our constant need to label those commitments and allegiances."

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Well, that's what it is. I remember growing up as well, you know, it's like it was so much about, "Don't label me. I don't want to be labeled by you," tearing off any kind of labels. And it feels like now it's kind of gone full circle, and now it's very much about the label and the right label, and making sure that we're all easily, quickly identifiable.

• 9:51Sam Fragoso?

  I was so close to saying, "Right, you're from Gen X."

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. "Don't label me, man!"

• 10:00Sam Fragoso?

  Can the label be accurate and also a joke?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it is. Look, but it's just one of many things. And I think the big thing about this, again, with this play too, and these people, is that they're kind of self-labeling as well, and how those labels just kind of fall apart, because it's change the only constant, right? Things are constantly shifting and morphing and changing, and the person he thinks is in front of him is changing right before his eyes, even if he doesn't want her to. Every character is just shifting and morphing, and I think that's why labels are kind of can be so ridiculous, because, you know, as soon as you label something, it's already shifting before your eyes.

• 10:35Sam Fragoso?

  This resistance towards labels, I think, dates back for you to the early 1980s, where you grew up in a nomadic, religious household that you've said had a real sense of impending doom, that the apocalypse was coming and that we were going to get left behind. Tough.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:56Sam Fragoso?

  As a young boy, did that kind of doom and gloom, did it push you closer to religion, or did it push you further away from it?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. It wasn't the doom and gloom that pushed me away. I think if anything, that was more a source of interest, you know? I was obsessed with the Book of Revelation, so psychedelic, too, you know? Like beasts with nine heads and, you know, all sorts of crazy shit. So that stuff was kind of fun and comic booky. What pushed me away was just the hypocrisy, like the clear, clear hypocrisy of it all. And it's funny, because like my sister became a climate scientist, you know? So she is, that's what she is. And so it's like very much, I think she was being prepared for end of days. She found a real use for that impending doom feeling. And I think there's impending doom in all the stuff that I do as well. There's some sense of, I think that's what I connect to the most, even in this play.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  It's not so much the, you know, the political aspect of it, of course, but it's more the primordial elemental aspects of it that really get to me.

• 11:59Sam Fragoso?

  As someone who's been diving back into your work the last week, there's definitely a thread.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  What do you think that thread is?

• 12:05Sam Fragoso?

  Well, we're gonna get into it. Because in 1992, you're like 12, 13 years old. You start writing plays and short stories. I think some of those plays would turn into musicals at school, which you kept inside a small desk at your home in Florida. A home that like months later would be destroyed by this hurricane Andrew. When you play that day back in your head, like hunching beneath the sofa cushions with your brother and sister, what does that look like?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Well, the actual hurricane itself, it was exciting and kind of fun. I had my little pug with me.

• 12:44Sam Fragoso?

  Did the pug think it was exciting?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  I think the pug was pretty chill the whole time, really, surprisingly.

• 12:48Sam Fragoso?

  No chance.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I mean, I remember him as being pretty chill and just hanging out with me underneath these cushions.

• 12:53Sam Fragoso?

  I think he blacked out.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  As the water was coming up. I don't remember actually ever feeling really afraid. I think there was just something that just felt so surreal about it that it didn't register to me until we left, until my dad like broke through the doors and like came through after the whole thing was done. And we were walking, you know, running through the neighborhood and it looked like an atom bomb had hit it. That's when I think the severity of what had happened was. And then the days afterward were the real bummer because there was no light. There was flooding everywhere and I had to stay at my grandma's by myself for some reason because I think my dad in his haste and also him and my mom were not speaking so much. And so she left Guatemala and took my sister and my brother. And then suddenly I was alone with my grandma with no electricity in the house.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  It just was like days of extreme boredom.

• 13:42Sam Fragoso?

  Did you lose all the stories that you wrote?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 13:48Sam Fragoso?

  Do you remember that?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still remember I can see the desk and I can remember where I put my, you know, Mockingbird and Cuckoo's bird story and where the Noah's Ark story was and yeah. I did have a video for a while. I don't think I, I don't have it anymore, but I had a video for a long while of the play when we actually performed it. So I did have a bit of a record of it.

• 14:10Sam Fragoso?

  How was it?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  It was pretty funny. It was pretty good. I mean, you know, there was some compromises had to be made, you know? You know, I wanted a male and female podopus and it could only be a male podopus and a cat. But I guess they could mate as well.

• 14:23Sam Fragoso?

  Compromise.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a, there was an artistic compromise there. You know?

• 14:27Sam Fragoso?

  At a young formative age like that, did going through that event, did it kind of awaken some kind of sense of impermanence?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  I think I've thought about that a lot, actually. Not only that event itself, but having, you know, moving so much. I think dealing with missing a place and nostalgia at a very young age. It's like, you know, what's a six-year-old being nostalgic about?

• 14:54Sam Fragoso?

  For being five.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Well, now, now as a dad, I can see it. I see it, you know? But I remember just I had dreams for years of my house, where I would just be moving through my house and the house that got blown down and seeing the areas and, you know, remembering what the carpet was like and the cushions and the way that the light would go through the trees in the back and, and really longing for this place. Because also it was the last time that my family was all together because that's where my mom and dad lived before the divorce happened. It definitely was this symbol of this kind of long-lost thing that was completely gone. And I remember when my mom and I first found that house, because we went there together and it was one of the model houses. So it had all the kind of fake furniture.

• 15:34Sam Fragoso?

  Country Walk or something?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  It was in Country Walk, yeah. And it was actually right outside a country walk called King's Grant, right next to it. It had like a truck bunk bed. And that's where I was like, Mom, we have to live here. And we got to keep the truck bunk bed.

• 15:46Sam Fragoso?

  The fact that it's a model home, given where your family had come from, that that's all like torn asunder.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:54Sam Fragoso?

  On the other side of that, in the fallout, as you turn into like a punk rock teenage high schooler, how did you make sense of that time?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  You know, the, once we got back, we were out in Guatemala for a bit. And then we came back and I remember we drove up with my sister and my little brother. And my, we were driving up through Delray Beach and my mom had found this little house there. And it was the most magical time with a little pug as well. He was up there, Bugsy, and I would just go to the beach all the time. And I, it was my first time. Both my sister and I rebelled. The first day she put us in a private school and we came home like, and we just protested. We're like, we're not going back. And so I got to go for the first time to a public school. And it was a pretty rough public school and I fucking loved it. I loved it. I loved being there. I loved like the freedom of all the different people.

• 16:44Sam Fragoso?

  Did she like that you loved it?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  She didn't love that I loved it. And she was very much about trying to make sure I didn't get and fall into the wrong, you know, crowds and all that. And, but I think my anti-label thing, which started quite early and that maybe had some roots in kind of religious ideology where it's like, you know, you are not of this world. You're kind of passing through. There was a sense of like finding my individuality within that. So, you know, I had long hair and kind of dressed like a skater, but hung out with all like the Mexican and black kids, you know, and was kind of an arts guy, but also was running around, you know, doing other, other weird stuff as well. And so I kind of just floated around on the sides and then ended up moving to go to high school a little further up.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And when I was there, I first gravitated towards art school and I was learning to play guitar and I, and it was obvious that I should audition as an actor for it because I was already doing acting and stuff, but I refused and I wanted to audition for classical guitar, which I didn't really know how to play. And I still remember learning this one piece and like going in and sitting in front of the, like the classical teachers, the faculty and just like halfway through the piece, just, I've never been good at reading music and it's kind of mathematical. And so I just lost my place and I just started kind of improvising and it was really bad. And of course I didn't get in.

• 18:04Sam Fragoso?

  I thought the plot twist was gonna be, and I was really good.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  No, I was terrible. And so they invited me not to come. And so I ended up going to just regular old, you know, public high school and then getting into the drama program for a little bit. And then that kind of fell apart for me and I just moved into doing music instead and just found bands and found people that I played music with. I made some really good friends that I'm still friends with.

• 18:27Sam Fragoso?

  Well, so in between playing in bands and making taxi driver inspired short films in your friend's Honda, you have a yearbook quote that reads, "I like to be different and I'm into the arts. When you look at me, you can tell."

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Hey, man, at least I knew, at least I knew myself.

• 18:52Sam Fragoso?

  The thing is, when you look at me, you can tell. It's at once like earnest and arrogant and sweet.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And self-deprecating as well, you know? I mean, I was like rail thin with very long hair. A friend of mine from high school came to see the play not too long ago, and she showed me a thing that I had written in her yearbook that she had made.

• 19:15Sam Fragoso?

  What did it say?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  It was like, um, keep this, I'm gonna be famous one day, and now I have to go make love to the sky.

• 19:23Sam Fragoso?

  You weren't doing drugs in high school when you wrote that?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Wasn't.

• 19:26Sam Fragoso?

  Unbelievable.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:27Sam Fragoso?

  That was just, that was from within.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  That was just, that was just from within. That was just my natural inclination to be a weirdo.

• 19:35Sam Fragoso?

  I love that. It reminds me of your, your monologue on SNL that I think so many people heard and were like, oh, right. It's okay if I'm a little left of center.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:46Sam Fragoso?

  And the fact that you knew that at such a young age.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 19:49Sam Fragoso?

  Did you really believe that thing you wrote in your friend's yearbook?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was someone else that had shown me that I had written that in someone else's yearbook, too.

• 20:00Sam Fragoso?

  God, we couldn't even.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I was a terror.

• 20:02Sam Fragoso?

  See, if you did it once, then we could write it off.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but no.

• 20:05Sam Fragoso?

  You're a repeat offender.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  I was a repeat offender of this.

• 20:07Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  I'm gonna be famous one day thing.

• 20:09Sam Fragoso?

  Now that you're a father and you're, I'm sure, thinking about, you know, like being a dad, but also young kids and your own time being a young kid. How would you describe yourself back then at that age? At the end of high school before you, you go off to college?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I was very wounded, just from a really kind of chaotic family life. I mean, loving family, but just like all over the place. And a bit torn between kind of being hungry for life and experience and also feeling a deep responsibility about being a moral person and doing the right thing.

• 20:45Sam Fragoso?

  What does that mean exactly?

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Not. Going off and leaving the family and going crazy and doing drugs and partying and drinking and then like dating lots of girls and all this different, you know, there was like a still a kind of a moral streak. There was a little bit of a kind of a straight edge thing that I had that had become a bit of my identity that like I was on all these bands, but I and I would hang out with everybody like high as fuck, but I just wouldn't be a part of it. And I wouldn't judge either. I'd be like having fun, but it just was like, oh, no, that's not my thing. My thing is I don't do that.

• 21:17Sam Fragoso?

  You wanted one foot in.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:20Sam Fragoso?

  But still one foot out.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of my life is always this kind of one foot in, one foot out. I was always on the outside, feeling like I was just kind of observing it, kind of participating, but always being aware of that and not really. And so I think that led to a lot of conflict about not ever really committing one way or the other to anything except for, I'm going to be an artist. I want to make movies. I want to perform. I want to make music and act and like that was just like, and I was doing it. And every day, especially out of high school, I was every day I would wake up and be like, what is one thing I can do to further that goal?

• 21:56Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. This quote about this kind of like ping ponging back and forth. I always felt like I was observing life and not actually experiencing it. There was a lot of guilt with that sometimes, feeling like I was a vulture of my own life. What does that mean exactly? What did that look like?

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Like I'd be having a fight with my girlfriend and then part of me would be like, oh, that's good. That's good. You see, you see how you act like that? You see, that's what you would normally do if you were in that situation.

• 22:23Sam Fragoso?

  That's the one where you wanted to laugh, but you couldn't?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Or laugh. Yes. Or like, yeah, find something funny, but like, obviously it's shouldn't. It's not a funny situation, but on the outside, looking at it, I could see how that would be a funny thing, you know? And so there'd be, yeah, there'd be a lot of feeling of like, why do I do that? That's so fucked up. That's a little bit, I feel like a sociopath a little bit because like I'm not really. In it. And eventually ended up feeling like, understanding that I think it's that feeling that moved me or made it easier to become an artist. Because I had that and not to feel so guilty about it, you know, not to feel like I'm an artist and now I'm going to figure out how to use up my own life in order to fuel the art, you know, it was like, you know, what came first, the chicken or the egg kind of thing. And so I think that feeling of being on the outside, I still remember in kindergarten,

• 23:09Speaker 01

  and I see my son now how young that was, I was like in kindergarten pretending to have gotten beaten up by a kid who just like said something mean to me, but I pretended because it was a little closer to the Karate Kid movie that I had just seen. And so I wanted it to be like that had actually happened. And I was like, I remember laying on the floor and like be like, ugh, like squinting my eyes to see if Mr. Miyagi would come.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  But also being aware that I was full of shit, you know?

• 23:33Sam Fragoso?

  Now that you're like some years removed from that, why did you do that?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Well, I, yeah, I know, I don't have an answer. I don't know why I was more inclined towards that kind of fantasy way of being. My father was very artistic and always had movies around and always would bring movies. He was a big, every Friday night he would come, but like a brown case with a Betamax in it, new different movie. So that was like a huge part of growing up and connection and excitement. So I think maybe as that marriage fractured, there was probably, it was a source of connection. And it's funny because these last couple of years, I'd say the last year really has been about letting go of that and actually falling through the void into living in the world and committing to being here and not just observing it anymore, you know?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  That's been a really interesting way and also interesting in how it affects the work.

• 24:28Sam Fragoso?

  So when you were starting to figure out what the work looked like, that was 2001-ish, you moved from Florida to New York City. You decided to enroll at Juilliard. Of that time, I was trying to make sense of the kind of person or actor you were and I found something from a classmate of yours. She's a good actor, I mean, people have heard of her, her name's Jessica Chastain. And she described you as a bit of a troublemaker. He was very mischievous, she said. I would tease him a lot because he would behave badly and I would take him to task for it. Is that accurate?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  It's true. It's all true. No, yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I have a, there's a rebellious streak in me. I don't know. There's just something that's just that wants to go against the thing and it's like an uncontrollable itch that suddenly overtakes me and that creates some form of like rebellion in the moment, which is kind of what happens. It's less about like, oh, I'm the bad boy. I'm gonna go do some bad stuff because I want to misbehave. Like, that's definitely not my thing and never has been.

• 25:39Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, that wasn't in my notes.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's more of like in the spot, just like has to say the wrong thing or be the contrarian or, you know, there's just something in there that just kind of rebels in the moment. I think that's why doing this play feels so good because there's something about her, Lorraine Hansberry, as a non-conformist, as an anti-establishment person, as a provocateur who doesn't want to be labeled. I melded with it, as difficult as it's challenging and impossible. It's an impossible role. But I think that spirit is the thing that really hooks me.

• 26:11Sam Fragoso?

  And all of this life that we're talking about, to me, is in that character. It's in that performance. And how you got there, how you got to this play is so fascinating because when you leave school, the text that you keep returning to, as I understand it, is Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. What did that performance mean to you as a young actor?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  It was a combination of the intimacy that he's able to generate. There's almost like a clown thing that's happening with him in that movie as well. Like, he's behind a nose a little bit. There's a real openness to his face. There's a vulnerability, the way that he, that emotions kind of crackle across his face without him being aware of. It's that lack of awareness, lack of self-awareness, that really feels like it comes. It reminds me of watching a child actor, that movie. Like, I remember Keisha Castle Hughes in The Whale Rider. You know, when you just see a child actor, that they're just not aware that there's even a camera around. And somehow Pacino in that movie really gives me the sense that he is somehow, it's just happening for real.

• 27:19Sam Fragoso?

  There's also desperation.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:22Sam Fragoso?

  In that character.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  The, the, trying to grab a greased pole, that thing. And then the surprise, the, the lack of being able to label what he is. And, you know, and the way that he's playing with both comedy and tragedy intertwined at any given moment. Yeah, that moved me a little.

• 27:37Sam Fragoso?

  In the years leading to Inside Llewyn Davis in 2013, did some part of you, as like a struggling, young, working actor in New York, did some part of you see yourself in Pacino's desperation? Was some part of your time before Llewyn Davis marked by that desire to arrive at some place?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Hmm. I mean, there was a lot of hunger and a willingness to sacrifice anything.

• 28:05Sam Fragoso?

  What did that look like?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  It looked like me willing to go anywhere for however long amount of time, regardless of the relationship that I happen to be in at the moment, you know? That I was also still kind of struggling between wanting to build like a stable family life and just being an artist and going wherever it would take me. You know, following the advice of others that, you know, as far as career and what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to do it and the way that it's done and all this kind of stuff, you know? So just being kind of willing to follow that where it would take me, other than LA.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I have my boundaries.

• 28:42Sam Fragoso?

  He says while he stares at me, knowing damn well that I have to go back there tonight.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  No, you know what? I really like LA. I just don't like myself in LA.

• 28:53Sam Fragoso?

  What happens?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  In the past, maybe now it'd be different, but I just, I think I find myself getting a little too neurotic and compare and despair, that kind of whole thing. And everything is that kind of so saturated in that, that it's hard to kind of look away. And then obviously there's wonderful pockets of artists out there and people that have really good circles of friends, but I never put the time in.

• 29:14Sam Fragoso?

  We'll welcome you at any time when you, when you decide.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 29:16Sam Fragoso?

  When you do finally land the dream role of Llewyn Davis, the serendipity of that piece, what it demanded of you?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:27Sam Fragoso?

  That it asked you to basically use all the life that came before it. Did it feel predestined?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know about predestined, but I think that it was was one of those kind of tipping point things that happened. And yes, the serendipity and the incredible synchronicity of even five months prior to the audition, doing a movie and having a lot of downtime. And in that downtime, I just decided to go play open mics. It was in Pittsburgh and I was just kind of doing open mics and met some musicians and would play, just sort of playing a lot without even being aware that this audition was coming up, you know, that would require playing. And so that kind of synchronicity that happened was astounding

• 30:15Speaker 01

  and incredible. And, and yeah, it's still, sometimes I get afraid that it didn't happen. Suddenly just get like, like, no, no, that did happen, right? It happened. Yes, it happened. Okay.

• 30:29Sam Fragoso?

  Is that true? You really do feel that way?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Sometimes, even just like, yeah, even just saying about it, like, I don't want to talk about it too much in case it's like, it all is not true.

• 30:36Sam Fragoso?

  You know, unless like HBO is like gonna scrub it off, I think.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  It's gonna happen, you never know.

• 30:41Sam Fragoso?

  It's been more and more these days.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:43Sam Fragoso?

  But, I mean, in many ways, that makes sense because when you revisit the movie, and I just did, it really feels like a kind of miracle. The forces that came together to make it, the collaborators involved, you being entrusted to hold this movie, and you do so, so beautifully. I wonder, like, in the years to follow, did you realize only later that that was an anomaly in some ways, that it was a rare experience?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  I knew from the moment it was moving in my direction.

• 31:18Sam Fragoso?

  You knew in the moment.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, how unlikely, regardless of what it would mean afterwards, just the actual thing itself, it is also quite provocative, what it does to an audience. And it's, and it's not aspirational. And, you know, this country loves an aspirational story, and this is very not that. It's the anti-aspirational story. And that's what's so fucking great about it and I love about it. And it's also-

• 31:42Sam Fragoso?

  Because that can be the title of your memoir, by the way?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. The anti-aspirational story.

• 31:47Sam Fragoso?

  Three copies.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not aspiring to anything more.

• 31:52Sam Fragoso?

  Your brother, your sister, I guess me, fuck it.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  You can have mine.

• 31:57Sam Fragoso?

  You don't even want your own.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  I don't need mine. I don't need one.

• 31:59Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, my Lord. Why don't we take a break? And when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more to my guest, Oscar Isaac.

• 32:26Sam Fragoso?

  If you're a sports fan like me, you might already be counting the days until the FIFA World Cup begins this summer. Come June, thousands of tourists will travel to a handful of host cities, including Los Angeles, where I'm currently based. And if you're in one of those cities, this might be a good time to consider listing your space on Airbnb. It's an easy way to earn some extra money while welcoming guests from all over the world. For me, one of my best friends is already getting married on the East Coast this summer, which is kind of perfect timing in this case. I was already planning to leave, but now I can list my place on Airbnb, which will help offset the cost of the trip and also mean that I can probably get my friend and his fiancee a better wedding gift. The more I think about

• 33:07Sam Fragoso?

  it, it just makes a whole lot of sense. I'm away, somebody gets to enjoy my home, and I can make the most of my trip that I'm already taking. If you ever thought about hosting, this summer might be a great time as we welcome FIFA World Cup fans. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host. I think the best clothes you own are probably the ones you spend the least amount of time thinking about. They're just there when you need them. The sweater that goes with everything. The perfect pair of pants or the tee you always reach for first. That's what I've always liked about Quince. They focus on everyday staples made with premium materials

• 33:46Sam Fragoso?

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• 34:31Sam Fragoso?

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• 35:13Sam Fragoso?

  MUBI is a global film company bringing great cinema to the world and to you. Everything at MUBI is handpicked with an emphasis on visionary filmmakers and movies worth discovering. One new movie is called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, from writer-director Jane Seanbrun, who made the film I Saw the TV Glow. The film stars Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. It follows a young director tasked with resurrecting Camp Miasma, a once-beloved slasher franchise that, after years of sequels, has fallen out of favor. Looking for inspiration, she visits the reclusive actress who starred in the original film. But what begins at an attempt to revive the franchise soon pulls the two women into a blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium.

• 35:57Sam Fragoso?

  It's a world-expanding, genre-bending movie for one of the most distinctive filmmakers working today. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now streaming exclusively on MUBI. You can try MUBI free for 30 days at mubi.com/talkeasy. That's mubi, M-U-B-I, dot com, slash, talkeasy, for a whole month of great cinema for free.

• 36:27Sam Fragoso?

  We were talking earlier about the thread and the through line of these characters in some of these films, and especially with this new play. There is a trend of playing these abrasive idealists. I'm thinking about Ex Machina, My Most Violent Year, and that HBO mini-series, Show Me a Hero. But I want to sit with 2017. Within a span of five months, you have a collection of events that is a lot to hold. Your mother passes away, your child is born, you get married, and you take on the role of Hamlet, a role that you took in honor of your late mother who loved Shakespeare. And around that production, I think you did it at The Public, right?

• 37:13Sam Fragoso?

  You did this interview, and there's a passage I've just been turning over in my head like the last week, where you said, "It felt really good to have something like Hamlet to pour all that grief into and then also hope at the same time. You know, it's a funnel, and acting has always been where I go to understand things about life and the things that are happening to me. But it's one thing to grieve as a character and one thing to grieve as an actual, you know, person. In the six years since then, how have you made sense of both like the grief and the joy of that moment? Have you been able to experience them as a person?

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, you know, it was, the grieving publicly felt more like a funeral for her that I would hold, you know, it was three months or whatever it was of doing that play. But also, I was a wreck of a person. I would come home, I was just, you know, I was on steroids because my voice went, I was like a non-entity. And then, pretty stupidly, like right into it, because I was in this mode of like, well, I gotta do what they tell me. I have to do this movie that I had said I was gonna go do. Like, I went right into another movie. And, you know, it's like, just wore myself totally out by just continuing this cycle as opposed to like stopping and saying, I'm also a human being that needs to do things as a human being and to be a human animal and to actually grieve. So-

• 38:41Speaker 01

  You know, I'm things that I'm still dealing with that I felt like I probably just compartmentalized at the time to be able to do it and get through all those kind of events happening one at a time and the just the pure adrenaline of what that moment was like. I took almost two years off before doing this play from acting. And that was a really important thing to kind of find, find that equilibrium again and to to find a new way of being in the world after kind of going through so much and then kind of thinking that that I could just kind of keep going in the same way.

• 39:18Sam Fragoso?

  On the other side of that, what does that new way look like?

• 39:22Speaker 01

  It's interesting. The thing that keeps popping up in my head, not to name drop, but my dear friend Jeremy Strong, we've been talking a lot about theater and he's gonna go do this play and the people and and just, you know, I've been kind of talking to him a lot about what this process has been like because it's been a bit since he was on stage too. And he sent me this beautiful C.S. Lewis piece, this quote, I guess it is, or poem. The last thing it says is just remember these words, "Joy, patience, disinterestedness." And that's that's how you approach a sacrifice, right? Like whether the God enters into it, it's not up to you. You just have to know that that's part of that's that's the ritual and just approach it with those three things. And I feel like that named the thing that I've been cultivating, I think, over the last year or so is like

• 40:04Speaker 01

  finding a way to approach the work, approach the process with patience, joy, and disinterestedness.

• 40:10Sam Fragoso?

  That's why you used the word disinterested in the beginning of this conversation.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah. There's something that's makes it about something bigger than yourself or my own motivations for wanting to do something. You separate the self a bit. And I think that's what, you know, in middle age, that's a lot about, you know, like you're recalibrating your relationship with the self and what that means and what that what you need and how I can quiet that part of me down some more.

• 40:40Sam Fragoso?

  That's good. Later tonight, you're gonna do the thing you've been talking about. The joy, the patience, the disinterestedness. And I know when you were performing Hamlet, you had this like pre-show ritual that included music, a candle being lit, and a picture of your mother that was in the dressing room. Before you go onstage tonight, what does that pre-show ritual look like?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  So I have my picture of my mom there.

• 41:11Sam Fragoso?

  You do?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I light a candle. I also have my uncle, her brother, who died tragically in October, which was wild. It's like, it's almost like every time I do a play, someone really close to me passes away beforehand. And so I have a picture of both of them. And then I also have got pictures of my kids and my wife, and I have people I love around there. And I listen to music and I change it up, what I listen to.

• 41:35Sam Fragoso?

  What is it right now?

• 41:37Speaker 01

  I've been listening a lot since Bam. And it's one that's I listen to often. It's a playlist by my friend May Kalamawi, who is in Moon Night as well. She does tea ceremonies. And she just put this beautiful playlist together that is really calming. So so often, it's very calming music. It's funny, because I know Rachel gets her energy way up. So like sometimes when I'll knock on her door beforehand, she's like doing calisthenics and some aerobic dancing, Joan Baez.

• 42:03Sam Fragoso?

  Exactly what I do before the podcast.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. That's why you were sweating a little bit.

• 42:09Sam Fragoso?

  Thanks for reminding people.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  And I do the opposite. I'm like, everything's like very zen, out and quiet and calm, just trying to kind of get everything balanced and the energy ready to go out there. So so it's all very calming, the things I do backstage.

• 42:24Sam Fragoso?

  When you find yourself onstage and it's going well, because you mentioned you've done it badly. You've done it well.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I've intentionally done it badly.

• 42:33Sam Fragoso?

  You have?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:34Sam Fragoso?

  Did you tell ticket buyers that?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 42:39Sam Fragoso?

  Why did you intentionally do it badly?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Maybe it's not quite intentionally doing it badly. It's allowing for whatever is there. If nothing is there, allowing for that to be there as opposed to pushing

• 42:48Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  something else. Allowing it to be like, oh, I don't actually feel like this. I need to make this a joke right now. And so things that are usually were usually jokes. Let them fall flat a little bit. What happens? What happens if Sydney's not funny? What happens if it's all these reactions that I think that I'm supposed to do? Because that's what I've done all the time. What if, what if I don't do them? It's more of it's investigating that and seeing what's on the other side of that.

• 43:11Sam Fragoso?

  I see. How do you think it went on Sunday?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  On Sunday, the first, I remember the first act feeling really good and feeling like it was really cooking. And then I remember the second act feeling more challenging physically and feel a little heavier, heavy footed. That's what I remember. And then, and then being okay. And then also I remember a few times saying it's okay for Sydney to be exhausted, to be exhausted.

• 43:39Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I was there. I hadn't seen the play. I think that's right. But I felt that you and the rest of the cast completely landed the plane. And any part that may have felt heavy to you felt appropriate for the material at that time.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I think that's what I'm also finding too. And that's what's, what can I speak very humbling is that it doesn't matter. It like actually doesn't really matter what I feel.

• 44:05Sam Fragoso?

  Right.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter if I feel it was great. It doesn't matter if I feel it was bad. Doesn't matter if the, you know, it's like the play is bigger. And obviously, you know, Annie came and she has gave us notes from matinee on Saturday. And you know, there's things that clearly, you know, when this part moves quicker, something happens that's better, right? But in the bigger scheme, like it's not about that. And it's not about me willing something into being and having this kind of responsibility for it being good or it being bad at this point. I was saying too, cause it was like, there's something that's almost obsolete about the craft of having to do, having to recite something over and over again, because you have devices that'll recite it automatically forever for you. Right? At first, as an actor,

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Experiencing something as honestly and as truthfully as possible. That's kind of it, right? You take it on, you make choices that are interesting and unique to you and you experience it fully. But that's a part of it and that that's a very small portion of what I think I've found this whole process to be. And that's what I mean, that the liturgical thing, like this kind of like more religious thing, which is not even about your own personal pleasure. You know, it's like, you know what, your priest's getting off while he's doing the cate, you know, the whatever, the Eucharist, right?

• 45:19Sam Fragoso?

  Again, not on my bingo card.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Give something bigger to the experience, you know? And I think that that kind of surrendering to that, that's been like just unexpected and special.

• 45:30Sam Fragoso?

  As we leave, when you're thinking about a time where you're in the work, you're in this play and you're experiencing it truthfully, honestly, at its best, is there any part of you, maybe during the play or later at home at night or on your off day, that you're brought back to that Bible passage that your father would often cite to you as a kid? And then especially as a late teenager, when you decided to make a life out of acting, when you decided to do or try to do the work that you're now doing? You know that passage I'm talking about?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Do what's before you with all your might?

• 46:07Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, I I I thought as we leave, you would like to read it because I think it's quite moving.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Ecclesiastes, which is the best of the books of the Bible.

• 46:17Sam Fragoso?

  That's your power ranking?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my power. Ecclesiastes and Job, those two, you know, they're pretty close and they're both, they're both pretty dark. Ecclesiastes nine, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might. For in the realm of the dead where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. I have seen something else under the sun. The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all."

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  It's funny, because my dad, not even the first sentence, just the first part of the first sentence, which is, "Do what's before you with all your might." But the second part is like, "Because you're gonna fucking die. And when you're dead, you can't do anything. So do what's before you with all your might." It's pretty funny. I mean, that's the, that's some Coen brothers right there. Some Coen's gallows humor right there.

• 47:25Sam Fragoso?

  When I saw that that was a formative part of your childhood, I thought, you know, when you're a kid, you really needed the first line.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:36Sam Fragoso?

  And I think now that you're a father, not a punk rock, anti-label kid, who knew he was gonna be a movie star, the rest of that passage feels, I don't know, like important to remember, important to hold as you continue to finish out this show.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  It's gratitude, right? I mean, that's what it's, that's what it is. It's about gratitude. Because working, planning, knowledge, wisdom, all those things that are available to you, to have gratitude for those things, the possibility of those things. Because where you're going, there ain't none of that. Yeah. Wow, thanks for showing me that.

• 48:16Sam Fragoso?

  And sort of brings me back to the impermanence part that you and I have been circling. What to do with that?

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. It feels like it connects to that patience and joy and disinterestedness. It's a similar, you know, it has a very balanced nature to it. Because, yeah, that first line can just feel like ambition too, you know? But the why, the why is because you can't die. That's just, that's an amazing thing.

• 48:45Sam Fragoso?

  You know, you said only recently you decided to like wade into the void.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  To join the living?

• 48:52Sam Fragoso?

  To join the living. To wade into the void, I think you said earlier.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Maybe. There's always a little bit of sense of like, I got the rope tied around me and I'm being like lowered into the cave by the tribe to go see what's down there. And then they gotta pull me back up and I gotta describe everything that I saw. It feels like this process this last year has been about like snipping the cord and allowing myself to experience it without this sense of I have to bring it back and do something with it.

• 49:20Sam Fragoso?

  What does that feel like?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  It's frightening and it's uh it can be a little lonely, feel a little scary that way, but I think that it also feels like evolution, feels like change, it feels like like something new.

• 49:35Sam Fragoso?

  The bleak interpretation of this passage, you know, everything slips away in time, that everything we make of this life dissolves in the end. And yet, I don't know, I'm sitting across from you right now and I'm brought back to the performance I saw on Sunday. And I thought, well, you know, for three hours, you made meaning of that time and space. All of us were sitting there watching and I think like, yes, it's impermanent, but I wrote this down, you know, when I watch a performance like yours, whether it's in this play or inside Llewyn Davis or any of the great work that you've done, I don't

• 50:17Sam Fragoso?

  know, that that feeling of impermanence falls away. I think as an audience, you stop playing the end a little bit. And so I hope that's some consolation.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Well, that's beautiful. That's a really beautiful thing to share. I think of actually a line from the play that Sidney says, "The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescence. The how is what commands the living." And I think that that's why, yeah, I don't know why, why it's impermanent, why, you know, but that the how, it's like, well, while we're here, while you're, while you're here, you have a chance to do what's before you with all your might and to commit to things. I think that's also the play is very much about continue to put yourself out there, continue to feel. Why? I don't know why. What it'll do, who knows, probably will fail as things tend to, but that's not a reason to not continue.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  You know, and again, like collapsing time is a beautiful thing. That's something that art can do in such a beautiful way. That's what Lorraine does when you, you know, interact with this beautiful, these words and you hear them right now and they feel like, they feel the moment Shakespeare does that too, you know, these incredible moments of space and time just colliding together.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  You know, there's been four or five transcendent nights of like flow state of just like I could, you know, like just grace happens, the God enters the sacrifice and the thing catches fire, you know, like there's been those few moments and that alone is just so worth it as well. And then to know that doing the ritual every night is also worth it, even without the, you know, God entering the thing.

• 51:56Sam Fragoso?

  Well, maybe the sixth time will happen tonight.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe tonight's the sixth.

• 52:02Sam Fragoso?

  And above all, I appreciate working through the how and why and everything in between and for the time. Oscar Isaac, a pleasure.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 52:13Sam Fragoso?

  We did it.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, man.

• 52:15Sam Fragoso?

  Was that all right?

• 52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was great. Thank you.

• 53:06Sam Fragoso?

  I think a lot of us are gonna spend the next few weeks looking for gifts online. And while I like finding something thoughtful for the people in my life, the process can get a little ridiculous. You got a dozen tabs open, you're comparing prices and you're trying to remember which store had that one thing you saw that has a deal and you flagged it and you saved it and now you can't find it. Anyway, that's what I like about Shop. Shop brings all kinds of stores together in one place so you can search for what you're looking for across different brands while discovering new ones along the way, plus tracking all your orders without jumping in between websites. And just in time for the holidays, they're celebrating the all new shop.com with a pretty extraordinary

• 53:46Sam Fragoso?

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• 54:34Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening. I want to give a special thanks this week to Marie Bishara, Jeremy O. Harris, The Lead Company, Stephen Toll, and of course, our guest, Oscar Isaac. To learn more, you can visit our website at talkeasypod.com. That's talkeasypod.com. If you enjoyed today's talk, I'd recommend our conversations with other actors like Pedro Pascal, Tessa Thompson, Willem Dafoe, Michelle Williams, and Ethan Hawke. To hear those and more podcasts, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen.

• 55:19Sam Fragoso?

  You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, or our vinyl record with writer Fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talkeasypod.com/shop. That's talkeasypod.com/shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our executive producer is Janik Zabravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by Caitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was taped at City Box in New York City. Music by Dylan Peck, illustrations by Chris Shanoi. Photographs today are by Emma Mead. Video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gabberzak, Ian Jones, and Ethan Sinica.

• 56:03Sam Fragoso?

  I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with a new episode. Until then, stay safe and sol.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  I'm Dan Heath. On What It's Like to Be, I interview people about their jobs. Here's a married couple that drives a long haul truck together.

• 56:29Speaker 04

  We backed up and they loaded fresh dead rats.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

• 56:34Speaker 04

  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 56:41Speaker 04

  That's it.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast What It's Like to Be.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  History gets written, then rewritten, sometimes by scholars correcting the record, sometimes by committees deciding what a generation of kids will and won't learn. The version that makes it into the textbook isn't always the only story. It's the one that won out. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It shows you how outlets across the spectrum tell the same story, side by side, so you can spot the shading for yourself. Ground News gives each outlet a factuality rating, so you know how much weight to give the source, and shows you who owns it, so you know what's behind it. The Nobel Peace Center called it "an excellent way to stay informed,

• 57:33Speaker 05

  avoid echo chambers, and expand your worldview." So go to groundnews.com/rz. That's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash R-C for 40% off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com/rz, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com/rz.