In a Hollywood where the average high school student is played on screen by an actor ten years away from home, Mia Isaac and her lively performance in Do not let me go excel. Isaac turned 17 on the first day of shooting for the Hannah Marks-directed coming-of-age film. She plays Wally, the teenage daughter who reluctantly goes on a road trip with her father (John Cho), who is keeping his terminal cancer diagnosis a secret.
Born in Atlanta, Isaac had long known that she wanted to be an actor, but her parents were hesitant. Hoping to break the relaxation, at age 11, Isaac asked her parents for an agent — for Christmas. “My father told me I had to learn my multiplication first, all the way to 12,” Isaac recalls. After Isaac conquered those multiplication tables and landed an agent, he did some commercial work and auditioned for the requisite Nickelodeon and Disney Channel gamut, but “never felt super connected to a script,” she says.
When it comes to on-screen teens, there’s the ultra-cleaned kid’s network version, and then there’s the Euphoria end of the spectrum. Do not let me go (starting July 15 on Amazon Prime) occupies the sparsely populated in-between area. Isaac explains her character: “The way she grew up and matured was so similar to me. I felt seen.”
The recordings took place in New Zealand, where Cho had to be for his Netflix series Cowboy Bebop. With some effort, land for the American Southwest doubled. A year after getting her driver’s license, Isaac filmed driving scenes on roads that had to be closed and staged with cars driving in the opposite direction to local traffic. Then there were the simulated keg stands Isaac did for a party scene that was meant to take place at a Texas summer party, but was shot in the middle of the night in New Zealand autumn on a working cow farm.
Just as Wally comes of age with several on-screen firsts, Isaac experienced a series of on-set firsts. She was on a studio feature film set, in her first lead role, and was confronted early on with the reality of her first major emotional scene. “I was nervous because I wanted to do it right and it felt like so many people were watching,” she recalls. She had done a first take, but wasn’t completely happy with the result. Cho then pulled her aside: “He told me what I think I’ll remember forever: ‘One scene doesn’t define the whole character or the whole movie.’ ”
Isaac and Cho in Do not let me go.
Thanks to TAMAR MUNCH/AMAZON
Next Do not let me goIsaac went to New York to film the upcoming Searchlight satire Not alright, in which she plays a survivor of a school shooting. Next, Isaac has a decidedly mature role, directing the Hulu drama series black cake, an adaptation (expected in 2023) of Charmaine Wilkerson’s book, whose creative team includes Oprah Winfrey. She plays Covey, a star swimmer in 1960s Jamaica who, faced with an unwanted marriage, seemingly disappears into the ocean.
Since wrapping up her two films, Isaac has been in Atlanta, hanging out with former classmates finishing their senior year of high school. (Isaac graduated at age 16.) Between working on her Jamaican dialect and studying Wilkerson’s source material, she’s enjoyed time with her friends before college and is flying off to her next project – “just kids are and do stupid stuff.”
A version of this story first appeared in the July 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe.