EXCLUSIVE: To play or not to play Hamlet, that was never the question for Oscar Isaac .

He had long wanted to take on one of the most complex and demanding roles ever conceived, the titular Prince of Denmark.

“Sam Gold — the director — and I had been working on Hamlet for about 12, 13 years,” Isaac tells Deadline. “We had worked with it at Julliard; we were both students there. We had done all the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scenes as a one-act play, basically. And I had worked on it a lot. We would read it together, and so we always just knew it was going to happen at one point, and finally the time came to do it.”

That time came in 2017 in a production for the Public Theater in New York with Gold directing. The process of how it came together, how Isaac brought his distinctive i

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