The Fembot Gambit

Oscar Isaac at the SXSW 2015 premiere of Ex Machina (photo by John Anderson)

In Alex Garland's new science fiction thriller, Ex Machina, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a young programmer, travels to his employer-cum-coding-hero's remote bunker to perform a Turing test on Ava (Alicia Vikander), a specimen of artificial intelligence. What ensues is a gorgeously cerebral pas de deux between two men, each seeking to assert authority over the other, while a gorgeous robot mediates the conflict.

As Nathan, the enigmatic employer, Oscar Isaac sports a shaved head, bushy beard, and an assortment of personae, flitting from drinking buddy to benevolent mentor to menacing bully. The audience can sense that Nathan is up to something as the story progresses, but he's so inscrutable that it's hard to pin down his agenda. This complexity created some heavy lifting on Isaac's part as he approached this deeply misanthropic – and possibly unhinged – character.

"He was written [by Alex Garland] with such incredible language, such wit, danger, and unpredictability. It was for me to convince myself that I could be that guy. I tried to look at people who had brilliant minds and had some of those qualities," says Isaac. We're sitting on the patio of the Austin Four Seasons the morning after the movie's debut at SXSW; he is polite, professional, serene, and his full head of hair serves as a reminder that he is not the brutal creature whose psyche he inhabited for the film.

Isaac, who modeled Nathan's physical look and Bronx-inflected accent on Stanley Kubrick, says the iconic director "was a very mysterious figure who was a genius and had a very specific way of working. He could be a little bit scary as well."

The inspiration for Nathan's psyche came from a more surprising place: the tortured chess champion Bobby Fischer. "[He] was so brilliant at this one thing, but filled with such darkness and despair. I actually played a lot of chess during filming just to get myself in that mode of constantly trying to be a few steps ahead." Isaac laughs, then qualifies his statement: "I'm not a particularly good chess player, but it was a good way of feeling like I was in that mode."

While chess is frequently used as a way to engender camaraderie between friendly rivals, the gambits between the men in Ex Machina are rooted in manipulation. Caleb and Nathan spar continually over the course of the film, but not ever in the physical sense, and the two men's disparate physiques clue us in to that understanding very early on. The ginger-haired Caleb is willowy and lean, while Nathan simmers with tightly coiled masculinity that's muscular and unmistakably alpha. To demonstrate their dominance, the men instead resort to trading ever-higher-stakes philosophical volleys, which wasn't always a happy place for the actors to be.

"I'm in a state where I'm constantly putting [Gleeson] on his back foot, and that can feel like bullying to a certain extent," says Isaac, reflecting on his relationship with his colleague during filming. "But I felt like the ball was constantly going back and forth between us. That for me was one of the most exciting parts; the big action sequences are these dialogue pieces where two guys are torturing each other with their brains."

I ask Isaac whether he thinks that Ex Machina is intended to function as a comment upon current anxieties about Facebook and phone privacy or whether the NSA can see the boudoir photos we text to our lovers. "For me, the story is about humanity now and what we define as consciousness. How can I ever be sure that we experience the world in the same way?"

Ex Machina opens Friday, April 17. See Film Listings, at right, for review and showtimes.