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Moon Knight Featurette Tries To Explain Marvel's New Weird Superhero

Moon Knight Marvel Studios
By Jeremy Mathai

A fresh new superhero, pulled from the ranks of Marvel's lesser-known tier of comic book characters, is set to make the leap to live action for general audiences who have likely never even heard of him before. Psh, been there, done that, am I right?

By now, this sort of thing is old hat for the folks at Marvel. Once James Gunn manage to turn the freaking Guardians of the Galaxy into household names, anything and everything became up for grabs. By comparison, the studio has much less riding on the fate of "Moon Knight." Premiering on Disney+ in a matter of weeks, the in-home streaming service feels like the perfect avenue to formally introduce casual viewers to the character. With a backstory steeped in mental illness, heaps of Egyptian mythology and lore, and a fascinating set of distinctive powers, chances are high that Moon Knight is set to become the next big name that comic fans could hardly have ever dreamed of seeing fully realized on-screen.

Before we get there, though, it helps to ease viewers into the experience in the meantime. That's what this latest "Moon Knight" featurette is clearly intended to do, giving us the broad strokes of what to know about the character through brief interview snippets with the cast and crew — from Oscar Isaac to Ethan Hawke to director Mohamed Diab to Kevin Feige himself. Check it out below!

Introducing Moon Knight

Steven Grant. Marc Spector. Moon Knight. Aas a character that suffers from dissociative identity disorder, he goes by many names and several different personalities to match, which series director Mohamed Diab goes ahead and spells out for us at one point in the featurette. "The way we're tackling the story, we learn about Steven. Then we learn about Marc. And they're the same person." It was rather hard not to notice Oscar Isaac's hilarious Cockney(?) accent, which was just one additional way to help differentiate Steven's identity from the others. Oh, and let's never forget that it was the actor's idea in the first place. This is yet another reason why we love Oscar Isaac, folks.

The footage kicks off with a quote by, of all people, Ethan Hawke. The immensely talented actor — who is typically less-than-impressed by superhero movies – sets the scene by saying, "The fun of 'Moon Knight' is getting introduced to a new superhero in a new world." Hawke portrays the villainous Arthur Harrow, though this particular featurette doesn't exactly shed much light on the villain (who is based on a relatively obscure comic book character). It makes sense that Marvel would want to keep the focus on the eponymous Moon Knight himself. 

Isaac, in a familiar echoing of his previous comments, describes the show as "...a real, legitimate character study." In between stunning imagery of Egyptian tableaus and Moon Knight suiting up and showing off some of his supernatural skillset, Feige chimes in to say that, "Moon Knight is a spectacular character. He's got an incredibly unique visual look." And most importantly, Isaac makes it 100% clear that the mission statement going into this series was to treat the character with as much nuance, empathy, and understanding as possible.

"Our job was to kind of put a lens on the things that had the most dramatic juice. And ultimately take the mental health aspect incredibly seriously."

Any comic book fan will tell you how interesting and surprisingly complex the source material is for this dark hero, who's far from a Batman knockoff. But both casual and diehard fan alike can agree that everything we've seen from this series so far points to one of Marvel's weirdest heroes yet.

"Moon Knight" comes to Disney+ on March 30, 2022. Check out some new posters, as well!

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