Why Oscar Isaac Wanted to Play Marvel's Moon Knight

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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