‘Moon Knight’ Here’s What You Need to Know

‘Moon Knight’ Here’s What You Need to Know

Web Desk
March 30, 2022

‘Moon Knight’ Here’s What You Need to Know

Starring Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke, the new Marvel series follows a troubled, crime-fighting caped crusader.

If you’re a fan of superhero comics, you probably know Moon Knight, the empowered, mentally unstable vigilante played by Oscar Isaac in the new Disney+ Marvel mini-series, debuting Wednesday.

“If you’re doing a Spider-Man movie, the fans know there has to be a Peter Parker,” Slater said. “But we really had a lot of latitude with Moon Knight.”

So who is Moon Knight? And what kinds of surprises lie in store for longtime fans? Creator Slater and “Moon Knight” executive producer, Grant Curtis, discussed about the choices they made and about the history of one of Marvel Comic’s most unusual creations.

Moon Knight emerged from a comic book era that fans refer to as the Bronze Age, when a new wave of writers and artists who had grown up as science-fiction, fantasy and superhero fans began introducing more mature themes and story lines to the medium.

Moon Knight debuted in a 1975 issue of the horror-adventure comic Werewolf by Night as a mercenary out to capture the series title monster. With his white mask, white hood and long white cape, the character cut such a striking figure that other Marvel writers and artists soon started dropping him into their stories.

In Disney’s “Moon Knight,” Isaac begins as Steven Grant, who is not a billionaire but rather a meek gift shop employee at a British museum. He also has frequent blackouts. By the end of the first episode, he begins to understand that whenever he is unconscious, his body is being inhabited by the troubled mercenary Marc Spector.

Curtis said that maintaining the “fallibility” of Moon Knight was essential.

The hero’s struggles felt very “adult” in comics which made them all the more appealing to 1980s teenagers.

Slater and Curtis were tight-lipped about which of the crew will appear on the show, though Curtis did say, “We have a few surprises in there for the fans, down to the very last frame.”

The villain in the “Moon Knight” series is a cult leader, Arthur Harrow, played by Ethan Hawke. Harrow is a soft-spoken visionary who follows a different Egyptian deity from Khonshu, and he thinks some of Spector’s ancient artifacts could be used to transform the world for the better. “He’s a foil that’s very similar to Marc Spector,” Curtis said. “You never really know who to root for and who to root against.”

The producers also worked with mental health experts to make sure they were sensitive to one of the other major traits that separates Moon Knight from Batman and other heroes: his struggles with dissociative identity disorder.

Slater said the ultimate aim with his “Moon Knight” was to make something that established the character as uniquely edgy and complex, much as Moon Knight has always been in the Marvel Comics universe.

“Millions of people are going to watch this,” Slater said. “You may only get one shot to work on something like that. So our approach in the writers’ room was to push the boundaries of how weird we can make it.”