Here's how 'Annihilation' snagged Oscar Isaac from 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' (exclusive)
Annihilation is one of the year’s best films, a hallucinatory journey into an alien heart of darkness, and it proves once more that its writer-director, Alex Garland — responsible for penning 28 Days Later and Dredd, as well as helming Ex Machina — has few equals in sci-fi cinema. The film arrives on home video this month, Yahoo Entertainment has an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip that explains how the project was able to get its leading man, who at the time was busy in a galaxy far, far away.
Given that Oscar Isaac headlined Garland’s Ex Machina, it’s no surprise the filmmaker would again look to collaborate with the star on his latest endeavor. The problem, however, was that Isaac was committed to making a little film called Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Fortunately for the Annihilation team, both productions were taking place at England’s Pinewood Studios, and Lucasfilm (and director Rian Johnson) were generous enough to lend their Poe Dameron out to Garland to play the husband of Natalie Portman’s biologist, whose return from a strange mission — and newly bizarre demeanor and physical condition — is the impetus for Portman’s own ensuing odyssey into a mysterious region known as “The Shimmer.”
As Isaac states in the above clip, while he feared that straddling the vastly different films would be exhausting, their tonal differences were in fact just what he needed. You can hear him discuss his fantastic work in Annihilation above, and catch the film on digital HD today, and on Blu-ray and DVD on May 29.
Watch the trailer:
Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: