Moon Knight Director on Oscar Isaac’s Dueling Dual Identities

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Wednesday’s “Summon the Suit” episode of Moon Knight. “Steven with a V” has a new name: Mr. Knight. Recently sacked gift-shop employee Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) is starting to uncover his history as mercenary Marc Spector, who serves Egyptian god of the moon Khonshu (voice of F. Murray Abraham) as his avatar. With Khonshu’s former avatar Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in pursuit of the scarab pointing to the ancient tomb of Ammit, who if reawakened will unleash her judgment on evildoers, Steven is told to “summon the suit” — the three-piece all-white suit of Mr. Knight. 

Playing a character with dissociative identity disorder sees Isaac shift from the bumbling Steven to the tough-talking Marc, sometimes in the same scene. In a new interview with Marvel.com, director and executive producer Mohamed Diab revealed the difficulties of having Isaac play Steven, Marc, Moon Knight, and Mr. Knight.

“At the beginning, it wasn’t clear to us who Marc is and who Steven is. Oscar at the beginning wanted only to [embody] Steven a day and Marc a day, never on the same day,” Diab said. “After a while there were a couple of scenes where he was talking in the mirror, and I told him, ‘Why don’t you try [both characters]?’ I kept pushing him and giving him encouragement. All of a sudden, he did this magical thing.”

Isaac slipped between characters so effortlessly that “when the camera is just panning all of a sudden, he’s someone else,” Diab said. “Once he’s Marc, you see him getting taller. When he’s Steven, he’s so approachable.”

He explained, “Oscar actually wanted to go back and do [some scenes] again, the shots that he did on different days. He actually wanted to do it in the same take because he became [both characters]. In all of the times that came afterwards, that’s how we did it. In those seconds, he’s someone else. It’s inhabiting a different character and being someone else, taking on a different demeanor and a different accent. It’s not easy, but he did it. He’s a genius.” 

Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, who directed Episode 2, noted how comfortable Isaac became at talking to the man in the mirror: Marc.

“The visual approach was really based around the idea of Oscar telling us like, ‘hey, I feel comfortable just going between these two characters at this point,’ so we were able to just do really old school techniques of just literally- camera goes off of Oscar playing Marc and on to- and now he’s Steven in the mirror,” Benson said. “We could just do all of that on camera, because he felt secure enough with it. It was something he showed up on day one able just to do. You would look at him without him even speaking, and you’d know which character he was.”

New episodes of Marvel’s Moon Knight are streaming Wednesdays on Disney+.

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