Moon Knight: Why Ethan Hawke’s Character Might Not Really Be the Bad Guy

Through three episodes of Marvel’s acclaimed Moon Knight series, Ethan Hawke’s Arthur Harrow has been established as the show’s main villain. The man who puts broken glass in his sandals every day before leaving his house is obsessed with judgement, and he’s aiming to resurrect the Egyptian god Ammit, who will punish the wicked around the world, even if they’re not so wicked yet. If you were to ask Harrow, however, he’d probably say that Khonshu is the real villain of the story. 

While he’s certainly misguided in his methods, there’s a chance Arthur may not be Moon Knight‘s big bad after all. Maybe he’s got a point about Khonshu. Perhaps Ammit isn’t telling him the entire truth. Moon Knight star Oscar Isaac recently told Marvel.com that there may be more to Arthur than we think. Steven still hasn’t even made up his mind about the man just yet.

“[Steven] doesn’t know if [Harrow] is someone that he can trust, because he seems to be scary and doing nefarious things, but at the same time, there’s also a lot of good,” Isaac said. “There are people that seem to be happy. There’s a community that’s forming around him. For Steven, it’s about figuring out if his intentions are good or is he out to do real evil? And Marc sure thinks that Arthur Harrow is a villain, and needs to be stopped at all costs.”

Whether he really is the villain or not, the one thing we know for certain is that Ethan Hawke is absolutely crushing the role. Fans love his take on Arthur Harrow. That said, he wasn’t initially in Marvel’s plans. The writers had intending on making the character much older, using his fear or mortality in the face of his age as the driving force behind his actions. When Hawke revealed his interest in the series (after a chance meeting with Isaac), the writers immediately scrapped their previous version of Harrow.

“I pitched and wrote a draft where he was much [older],’” series creator and head writer Jeremy Slater explained. “In that version, it was very much someone looking at their own mortality, reaching the end of the road, being terrified of that, and desperate to do anything to capture it.”

“The second Oscar came to everyone and said, ‘Look, I think I can get Ethan Hawke in this.’ We quickly abandoned the idea of an older Harrow because when you get a chance to get Ethan Hawke, you take it.”

New episodes of Moon Knight arrive on Disney+ every Wednesday.