Moon Knight: How Mohamed Diab Directed Multiple Marvel Personalities

There are a lot of things that make Moon Knight different than other Marvel heroes. Not only is he the vessel of an Egyptian deity charged with safeguarding those who travel at night, the character also deals with dissociative identity disorder. There are multiple people living in the same body. The upcoming Moon Knight series on Disney+ puts those personalities front and center, as Oscar Isaac stars as both timid gift shop worker Steven Grant and gritty mercenary Marc Spector.

Moon Knight develops and explores Steven and Marc as individual characters, though their physical body can only be controlled by one or the other. A lot of clever work with reflections allows Isaac’s two character to banter back-and-forth throughout the series. During an interview with ComicBook.com ahead of the premiere, Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab opened up about how the series brings both Marc and Steven to life.

“First of all we have to give it to Jeremy Slater, ’cause there’s so many iterations of Moon Knight and all of them are interesting but to take the story and make Steven into someone that everyone can identify with him and all of a sudden that person discovers that he has a different identity which is a superhero, a genius pitch. I love that,” Diab explained. “I tried to get to take that and to disorient the audience as exactly Marc and Steven. And by the way, one of the scariest things for me as a storyteller was the switch. We love Steven now, and all of a sudden switch. Now we’re with Marc, someone you know nothing about. He looks like him, he’s completely different. And he seems like a harder guy to fall in love with. But again, I think we succeeded in that. At least that’s what the people who saw the episodes are telling us.”

“But I mean I love this orientation and it’s exactly living through DID,” he continued. “Just very important to point out that as respectful as we were dealing with DID using experts and everything, this is not an accurate depiction of DID ’cause it’s still blended in the superhero world and it’s a bit fantastical. But I still would say that people are gonna learn about it just like I did.”

Are you excited to see Oscar Isaac bring both Marc and Steven to the screen this week? Let us know in the comments!

Marvel Studios’ Moon Knight debuts on Disney+ on March 30th.