Somewhere out there amongst the people of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one Raul Bushman, the arch-nemesis of Marc Spector’s Moon Knight. While the character was referenced in an episode of the Moon Knight show on Disney+, he never appeared in the flesh. Still, series head writer Jeremy Slater tells us not only is Bushman still kicking, he thinks he’s a character that has to appear at some point in the journey of Moon Knight.
“I don’t know if he still has his face. That’s a good question,” Slater tells us of the iconic Moon Knight comics sequence where the vigilante cuts off Bushman’s face in a NSFW scene. “He’s definitely still out there. And I think at some point in Moon Knight’s journey, you’re going to have to involve Bushman.”
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Like some other characters that didn’t make the final cut, Slater tried getting the villain into this version of the show, but it simply didn’t work with what the overarching story was.
“I tried very hard to get him in there in a couple different versions of Bushman. And there were just a lot of reasons why he wasn’t great as an antagonist for this first story,” Slater adds. “The main one was just that we had to start from Steven’s perspective. That was something I really believed in right from the beginning is that you’re never going to make people fall in love with Marc, unless they fall in love with Steven first. And we realize Marc is Steven’s protector. But by doing it in that order and starting from Steven’s perspective, it made it very hard to have Bushman show up because Bushman is just a guy with a gun. And that immediately makes him way too lethal for Steven. Bullet in the head, Steven’s gone.”
There were discussions of making Bushman an avatar of one of the other gods, but there just wasn’t enough time or space for that story beat to come to life.
“The only way to remedy that would be to give Bushman superpowers to make him his own avatar. And that just felt like we didn’t have the real estate to introduce that character and take him on a journey and get him to that point,” the writer concludes. “It felt like we needed an onscreen villain in those first couple episodes, so we had to reverse engineer Arthur Harrow.”
Moon Knightย is now streaming in its entirety on Disney+.
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