Moon Knight Writer Reveals Disney+ Series Took a Year to Write

It’s been a few months since the Disney+ debut of Moon Knight, a live-action series that brought a surprising new flavor to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. The series introduced Steven Grant / Marc Spector / Moon Knight (Oscar Isaac) to general audiences with great fanfare, with a storyline that paid tribute to a lot of elements of his unique and wide-ranging comic book lore. Marvel fans have been left pleasantly surprised by how the series threaded the narrative needle of Moon Knight, and a new interview with head writer Jeremy Slater reveals how long that process took. In a recent interview with The Playlist, Slater revealed that writing Moon Knight ultimately took over a year, in part because of the nuance required for portraying Moon Knight’s dissociative identity disorder.

“Our writers’ room ran for 24 weeks, and then I was writing versions of that on my own for probably another year after that,” Slater revealed. “And over that time, we probably went through six or seven different versions of the show that had sort of wildly different MacGuffins and villains and love interests and everything else. But for us, the trickiest aspect of the show and the thing that we were always sort of focusing on for each new iteration was really doing justice to the sort of mental health metaphor that’s sort of at the heart of the show, knowing that our show is about one man’s struggle with his own mind and his own mental health.”

“And while a lot of our viewers, most of our viewers are not going to be suffering from the same affliction, most of them aren’t going to have dissociative identity disorder, we knew that mental health was going to be a stand-in for a lot of other things,” Slater continued. “Everyone has their own struggles, whether that’s anxiety or depression, or anything else. And so it was really important to all of our writers and creative partners that whatever we’re putting out there in the world has to ultimately be positive. Knowing that you’re going to have millions and millions of eyeballs on something like this just because it carries the Marvel brand, we felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to get that aspect right and to make sure that, at the end of the day, we’re telling a story about mental health that’s empowering viewers rather than making them feel attacked or making them feel isolated or lonely. So that was kind of our North Star in terms of what we were aiming for, and all of our other sort of creative decisions came out of that.”

Moon Knight follows Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift-shop employee, who becomes plagued with blackouts and memories of another life. Steven discovers he has dissociative identity disorder and shares a body with mercenary Marc Spector. As Steven/Marc’s enemies converge upon them, they must navigate their complex identities while thrust into a deadly mystery among the powerful gods of Egypt.

All six episodes of Moon Knight are now available to stream exclusively on Disney+. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.

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