David Simon’s tough-love TV

By Tom Shone

In just two years, Oscar Isaac has proven himself the most versatile screen actor to emerge from Hollywood in the last decade. He came to fame playing the self-absorbed folk musician at the heart of the Coen brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis” (2013). In the two years since, he has played a Greek con artist in the largely unseen but highly rewarding “Two Faces of January”, a Queens oil importer struggling to stay on the right side of the law in J.C. Chandor’s excellent “A Most Violent Year”, and a sleazy, tech-era Mephistopheles in Alex Garland’s equally excellent “Ex Machina”. In each case, he has pulled off assured, unshowy performances without a single whisper about his “commitment”, his “transformation” or his “unrecognisability”—or any of the other buzz words with which actors hold their own against ever more spectacular special effects: come see the movie star morph!

Isaac’s mutability is instead inbuilt. Of mixed Cuban, French and Guatemalan heritage, he could play almost any nationality on screen, or none. At 36, he can just as easily play someone in their 20s as in their 30s, and his morality seems equally unfixed. In another era, his sleepy, low-lidded eyes might have pegged him as an exotic matinee idol, in the mold of Omar Sharif or Rudolph Valentino. Today they lend him an air of quick calculation, which makes him good at playing selfish or ambitious men, and perfect for his role in David Simon’s new six-part series for HBO, “Show Me a Hero”. His character, Nick Wasicsko, is a young mayor who jams through enough votes to get desegregated public housing—housing, that is, for blacks from the projects—built in the middle of suburban Yonkers. It’s a task which, in Simon’s estimation, seems about as difficult as persuading a charging herd of rhinoceros to sit down and have a cup of tea with some wildebeest.