Oscar Isaac Just Named the One Co-Star He Says No One Else Can Touch
Some on-screen partnerships take decades to fully click, and few pairings in modern film and television carry the kind of history that Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan share. Their collaboration stretches back to 2011, when Isaac played Mulligan’s ex-convict husband in Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish thriller ‘Drive.’Their on-screen chemistry first caught attention more than a decade ago, and it’s only deepened with each new project the two actors have tackled together.
They reunited two years later for the Coen brothers’ ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’ playing a chaotic, emotionally messy duo that further cemented their creative shorthand. Most recently, the pair returned for season two of Netflix’s ‘Beef,’ playing Josh and Lindsay Martin, a country club general manager and his wife whose marriage is quietly falling apart beneath a polished exterior.Josh is married to Lindsay, an upper crust Brit who has all the external status markers that Josh lacks, but perhaps not his obsequious gifts or ambition.
That long running creative bond is what makes Isaac’s latest comments so striking. In a new interview, Isaac was blunt about who he considers his favorite scene partner of all time, and the answer was Mulligan herself. “Carey is the best actor I’ve ever worked with. Nobody compares to her in my book,” he said. “She’s incredibly funny, deep, and soulful. She’s both intuitive and also incredibly precise. It’s a real magic trick with her.”
The admiration clearly runs both ways. Mulligan has described the pair as friends ever since their earliest collaborations, noting that a lot of relational baggage is out of the way once you have known someone that long, and calling Isaac the most fun person to fight with on screen. That familiarity reportedly gave the two actors room to lean into ‘Beef’ season two’s tone, which trades the road rage of season one for something quieter and more corrosive.
The ‘Beef’ co-stars also opened up about how their dynamic has evolved since ‘Drive’ first put them together fifteen years ago. Isaac told PEOPLE that the connection felt far stronger this time around, largely because their earlier shoot together was brief. “There’s more, and more because when we first met, we, on that film, I was only on set for about a week,” he explained.
Season two of ‘Beef’ finds Josh and Lindsay’s unraveling marriage colliding with a younger couple at the club, Austin and Ashley, played by Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny.When their marriage erupts in a vicious screaming match, young employees accidentally capture the chaos on video, triggering a chain of manipulation and blackmail. Critics have pointed to Isaac and Mulligan’s built in history as the engine behind the show’s tension, with the actors’ shared past giving their scenes a lived in intensity that newer pairings simply cannot fake.
Given how much shorthand these two have built across three very different projects, it is hard not to wonder what they could still do together. Which Isaac and Mulligan collaboration do you think brought out the best in both of them, ‘Drive,’ ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’ or ‘Beef’?
