Marvel’s latest mini-series Moon Knight will be introducing several new characters and storylines in the MCU and will be giving us a hero with a dissociative identity disorder. The Mohamed Diab directorial follow Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), whose mundane life is disrupted when he discovers that he shares a body with Marc Spector—a former mercenary and now the avatar of the Egyptian God of moon and vengeance- Khonshu.
Playing an imperfect and unreliable hero with a dissociative identity disorder, Isaac opened up in a recent press conference about what sets Marc Spector and Steven Grant apart from other MCU heroes. He expressed, “You’re just in the skin of this guy, and you’re seeing things happen. You’re experiencing it just as he’s experiencing it. So there’s something that’s terrifying about that. I think with Steven, there’s a sense of humour that is different from what we’ve seen. I think Marvel in particular has done such an amazing job at combining action and comedy in a great way. And I thought with Steven, there was a chance to do a different type of comedy than we’ve seen of somebody that doesn’t know they’re funny, doesn’t know they’re being funny. And then to find the counterpoint of that with Marc, in some ways leaning into a bit of the stereotype of the tortured, dark vigilante guy, but what makes him so special is that he has this little Englishman living inside of him.”
Ethan Hawke, who plays the antagonist Arthur Harrow in the series, added that having a mentally ill hero inverted the whole process of storytelling where the villains had to be ‘crazy’ and that was one of the aspects drawing him towards this series. He said, “The history of movies is paved with storytellers using mental illness as a building block for the villain. There are countless stories of mentally ill villains, and we have a mentally ill hero. And that’s fascinating because we’ve now inverted the whole process. So now as the antagonist, I can’t be crazy because the hero’s crazy. I have to find a sane lunatic or a sane malevolent force. And that was an interesting riddle for me to figure out how to be in dynamics with what Oscar was doing.”
Explaining the dynamics between the hero and the villain, he continued, “And Mohamed (director) was really embracing his mental illness as a way to create an unreliable narrator. Once you’ve broken the prism of reality, everything that the audience is seeing is from a skewed point of view. That’s really interesting for the villain because am I even being seen as I am?”
Isaac also shared an anecdote on how he used to manage playing both characters with different personalities, and most importantly- different accents. On being asked how he used to converse with himself, he quipped, “The first step was to hire my brother, Michael Hernandez, to come in and be the other me. That’s the closest thing to me there is on Earth. So he came in and he would play either Steven or Marc, even do the accent and everything, both accents. That was really helpful to have someone that’s not only a great actor but also shares my DNA to play off of.”
“But that was something that I didn’t anticipate was how technically demanding that was going to be of having to show up and decide which character I was going to play first. And then try to block that out, give my brother notes, and then do the scene, and then switch characters, and then figure it out. Because one of the fun things about acting is acting opposite somebody and letting something spontaneous happen that you didn’t expect. But there wasn’t really an opportunity to do that and still having to try to find what makes it feel spontaneous was challenging,” he concluded.
Also starring May Calamawy, Gaspard Ulliel, and F. Murray Abraham as Khonshu, Moon Knight will be streaming on Disney+ Hotstar from March 30.
