In his first turn hosting “Saturday Night Live,” “Dune” star Oscar Isaac introduced the audience to his inner “Avenger” in a sweet boyhood home movie during his opening monologue this weekend.
The clip of a very young Isaac was in honor of his debut joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the haunted superhero of the Disney+ series “Moon Knight.”
“It’s kind of a full-circle moment, since the first movie I was ever in was called ‘The Avenger,‘” Isaac explained. “Not ‘The Avengers,’ which was a massive blockbuster. No, no, this was ‘The Avenger,’ which is a movie that 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,” he noted. “I play a ninja assassin training to fight his nemesis.”
Isaac also told viewers that his full name is Oscar Isaac Hernández Estrada, which triggered a riff about ethnicity in Hollywood. He’s half Guatemalan and half Cuban.
“I said to Hollywood, ‘You can pick two of these names,’” he said. “Guess what they went with? The white ones.”
Casting directors consider him “ethnically ambiguous,” he explained. “According to them, I can play anything from a pharaoh to Timothée Chalamet’s daddy” (in “Dune”).
“You know that joke: A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar?” Isaac asked. “Yeah, I could play anyone in that joke.”
Check it out in the the clip up top.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
