With its Super Bowl teaser earning over 3 million views and counting in less than a day, all signs point to “Moon Knight” being one of the biggest television series of the spring. The show marks Oscar Isaac’s introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Marc Spector, a former CIA operative turned mercenary who dies during a job in Sudan but is revived and turned into the conduit of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu. Isaac recently told Empire magazine that “Moon Knight” is a character study the likes of which the MCU has rarely seen.
“Often on these big movies it can feel like you’re building the plane on the runway,” Isaac said. “The idea of getting back to ‘handmade’ films, character studies… I was desperate for that feeling. [‘Moon Knight’] felt handmade. And it’s the first legitimate Marvel character-study since ‘Iron Man.’ I thought, ‘Maybe I can hijack this thing. Maybe this is the chance to do something really fucking nutty on a major stage.’”
The superhero Moon Knight is a Batman-esque vigilante. One of the character’s notable traits is his dissociative identity disorder, which manifests in several distinct personas with defined personalities.
“What I love most about this thing is that it’s an exploration of a mind that doesn’t know itself,” Isaac said of the series. “A human being that doesn’t know his own brain. I found that really moving: what the mind is capable of as far as survival. But the workload was massive: the technical challenge of embodying these different characters, physically, the way I manifest my body… It required a lot of energy.”
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Empire that “Moon Knight” is destined to go down as one of the more violent MCU offerings, calling the superhero “brutal.”
“It’s been fun to work with Disney Plus and see the boundaries shifting on what we’re able to do,” Feige said. “There are moments [in the series] when Moon Knight is wailing on another character, and it is loud and brutal, and the knee-jerk reaction is, ‘We’re gonna pull back on this, right?’ No. We’re not pulling back. There’s a tonal shift. This is a different thing. This is ‘Moon Knight.’”
“Moon Knight” debuts March 30 on Disney Plus.