Oscar Isaac jokes about being seen as ‘ethnically ambiguous’ on Saturday Night Live

The ‘Dune’ and ‘Star Wars’ actor, hosting SNL for the first time, also took the opportunity to broadcast an old home movie

Oscar Isaac hosting Saturday Night Live, 5 March 2022. (Saturday Night Live/Twitter)

Oscar Isaac hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time tonight (5 March), using part of his opening monologue to poke fun at the way he’s viewed by casting directors.

“I’m half Guatemalan, half Cuban – or, as casting directors call that, ‘Ethnically ambiguous,’” he said. “According to them, I can play anything from a pharaoh to Timothée Chalamet’s daddy.”

He also pointed out that his full name is Oscar Isaac Hernández Estrada. “I said to Hollywood, ‘You can pick two of these names,’” he joked. “Guess what they went with? The white ones.”

Warming to his theme, Isaac added that in the traditional joke format about a priest, a rabbi and a minister walking into a bar: “I could play anyone in that joke.”

Isaac gave over much of his monologue time to showing clips from a home movie he’d made at the age of 10 with a childhood friend.

He said that “joining the Marvel universe” in the forthcoming miniseries Moon Knight represented “kind of a full-circle moment” as his first film had been titled The Avenger.

“Not The Avengers, which was a massive blockbuster,” he clarified. “No, no. This was The Avenger, which is a movie I wrote, directed and starred in when I was 10 years old. It was shot on location in my buddy Bruce Ferguson’s backyard, in our hometown of Miami, Florida. I play a ninja assassin training to fight his nemesis.”

Isaac showed various clips of himself as a young budding actor, praising his evident commitment even as a child. In one scene, he licked a bloody sword clean.

“Now you may be asking, Oscar, why are you using your monologue to show us old home videos?” he said in conclusion. “And the reason is, it’s important to encourage kids to be weirdos. Because every once in a while, one of those weirdos grows up to host SNL.”

The night’s musical guest was Charli XCX, who had originally been set to perform on Saturday Night Live back on 18 December before that episode, hosted by Paul Rudd, was drastically downsized due to the surge of the Omicron variant of the Covid-19 pandemic.

XCX also appeared in a sketch, playing a singing meatball.