Oscar Isaac began his first-ever monologue as the host of Saturday Night Live with an air of self-deprecation: “They actually asked me to host back in 2015 but I said, ‘Nah, I’m not ready. I want to wait until after the pandemic.’ And they were like, ‘What pandemic?’”
The Star Wars and Dune actor quickly mentioned his excitement about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the star of Moon Knight, a new Disney+ television series. “This is a kind of a full-circle moment,” Isaac said since the first movie he was ever in was The Avenger.
“Not The Avengers, which was a massive blockbuster. 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, and we actually have a clip.”
Isaac cuts to the clip of the grainy home video. “[The film’s] arguably better than the real Avengers, and I made it for half the budget—only about $110 million. But I took it really seriously—maybe a little too seriously. Like in this scene.”
In the next clip, Isaac is a little kid (“acting his heart out”) while you can clearly see his friend’s dad cleaning the pool in the background. Isaac gave the dad, Bruce, a shoutout and added that NBCUniversal made him sign a licensing agreement in order to show the home videos (“The Avenger, coming this fall to Peacock!”)
After Isaac rolled the final clip from his childhood vault, he ended his monologue on a heartfelt note.
“Now you may be asking, Oscar, why are you using your monologue to show us old home videos? And the reason is, it’s important to encourage kids to be weirdos,” Isaac said. “Because every once in a while, one of those weirdos grows up to host SNL.”