MOON KNIGHT IS ONE OF MARVEL’S MOST OBSCURE, BRUTAL AND COMPLEX CHARACTERS. SO HOW EXACTLY HAS HE BAGGED HIS OWN DISNEY+ SERIES? STAR OSCAR ISAAC AND MORE TELL US WHY THE MCU IS EMBRACING THE SHADOWS

WORDS TOM ELLEN

Oscar Isaac’s gut was telling him: “No.”

Back in 2020, when the call came in to see if he might be interested in playing a little-known, ultraviolent comic-book character named Moon Knight, something didn’t sit right. “My initial thing was, ‘No, I don’t want to go back into that kind of machinery,’” Isaac tells Empire. “I did that already. The last thing I want is to be on a massive set, [thinking], ‘What am I doing here?’”

A lifelong Marvel fan, Isaac had played the X-Men villain Apocalypse in 2016, but it wasn’t an overtly pleasurable time — due largely to the “walking sarcophagus” of glue and latex he had to don every day. Plus, he’d just spent five (more pleasurable) years as Poe Dameron in Star Wars. After all that, he was ready to take a blockbuster sabbatical. “Often on these big movies it can feel like you’re building the plane on the runway,” he says. “The idea of getting back to ‘handmade’ films, character studies… I was desperate for that feeling.”

Fast-forward two years, though, and here’s Oscar Isaac, on Zoom, talking about playing a little-known, ultraviolent comicbook character named Moon Knight. So, what happened?

“It felt ‘handmade’,” he says, simply. “Andit’s the first legitimate Marvel character-study since Iron Man. Plus…” — and at this point a wicked grin creeps across Isaac’s countenance — “I thought, ‘Maybe I can hijack this thing. Maybe this is the chance to do something really fucking nutty on a major stage.’”

But how exactly to out-fucking-nutty what Phase Four of the MCU has already thrown up — from the genre-smashing weirdness of WandaVision to the mind-melting, cameostuffed scale of Spider-Man: No Way Home?

Maybe, after all that, the trick was not to go big, but to go small. To focus in tightly on the geography of a single mind in freefall, and ask — in Isaac’s words — “How can we make this an experiential thing, so we’re inside the eyes of the character, living in his state of fear and the unknown?”

Isaac’s path was clear. Forget the Multiverse: he was shooting for the dark side of the moon.

IF YOU’RE CURRENTLY WONDERING who Moon Knight is and why he gets to do anything — nutty or otherwise — on a major stage, you’re not alone. Moon Knight himself isn’t sure either.

In a particularly meta 2016 run of the comics, our hero’s alter-ego — playboy billionaire Steven Grant — sets about producing a Moon Knight movie, but within a few frames he loses all faith in his silver-caped alias. “I should never have let Marvel talk me into producing this mess,” Grant grumbles. “I mean, Moon Knight is a third-rate character at best. What was I thinking?’

Sceptical readers may wonder if similar comments weren’t being whispered inside the real Marvel Studios three years later, when a six-part Moon Knight Disney+ series was announced. After all, the streaming service’s first flush of MCU shows was set to focus on nothing but marquee names: Wanda, Vision, Bucky, Falcon, Loki, Hawkeye. All established characters with hours of screen-time already notched up between them. Fan favourites, safe choices. Whereas Moon Knight... Who the hell even is Moon Knight?