Why Oscar Isaac Wanted to Play Marvel's Moon Knight

03/21/2022 05:55 pm EDT

Oscar Isaac is of two minds in Moon Knight, but the actor was certain he wanted to play the "dark vigilante" who has a "little Englishman living inside of him." In the Marvel Studios Original series streaming March 30 on Disney+, Isaac plays the British-accented Steven Grant: a mild-mannered gift shop employee plagued by blackouts and memories of another life. The not-so-mild-mannered side of his personality is the mercenary Marc Specter, a.k.a. the costumed vigilante Moon Knight, who rises as a new Marvel hero when Steven discovers he has dissociative identity disorder. 

"With Steven, there was a chance to do a different type of comedy than what we've seen, of somebody who doesn't know they're funny," Isaac said at a Moon Knight press conference Monday. "And to find a counterpoint of that with Marc, in some ways of leaning into the dark vigilante guy. What makes him so special is that he has a little Englishman living inside of him."

Isaac has called the six-episode event series the "first legitimate Marvel character-study" since 2008's Iron Man. Along with his intentionally-poor accent as Steven Grant, Isaac is playing a character with a splintered mind. 

"What I love most about this thing is that it's an exploration of a mind that doesn't know itself. A human being that doesn't know his own brain," he previously told Empire Magazine. "I found that really moving: what the mind is capable of as far as survival. But the workload was massive: the technical challenge of embodying these different characters, physically, the way I manifest my body ... It required a lot of energy."

Starring Oscar Isaac as Steven Grant/Marc Spector, Ethan Hawke as the Ammit-obsessed cult leader Arthur Harrow, May Calamawy as Layla El-Faouly, Gaspard Ulliel as Midnight Man, and F. Murray Abraham as the voice of Egyptian moon god Khonshu, Marvel's Moon Knight is streaming March 30 on Disney+. 

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