It was the first time Hawke had agreed to a role in 35 years without reading a script.
Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab knew Ethan Hawke’s entry into the MCU was a big deal. So why not encourage the Oscar winner to create a unique take on a comic book villain?
Diab, who is directing four of the six Disney+ episodes premiering on the streamer March 30, revealed in a press conference that he had banned Hawke from reading the Moon Knight script before committing to the series connected.
“Everyone sees [Ethan] As this amazing legendary independent film actor, it’s a big thing to join the world of superheroes,” Diab said, as reported by Screen Rant. “When then [lead star] Oscar [Isaac] When I approached him and then talked to him about it, we pitched the idea to him, but I said to him, ‘Please don’t read the script.’ Not that the script is bad, but when you work with him, you have to get from him.”
Diab continued, “He told me, ‘This was the first time in 35 years that I signed something without reading a script.’ And he did it.”
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Hawke plays cult leader Arthur Harrow, who is associated with the Egyptian god Ammit, “the devourer of the dead.” Arthur faces off against Isaacs Marc Spector, a mercenary with dissociative identity disorder who is connected to fellow god Moon Knight.
Hawke also revealed to Collider that his Marvel debut was a long time coming. “There have been a few dances in the past, there have been a few roles that I wanted or was interested in that they weren’t interested in me,” the ‘Good Lord Bird’ star said. “And there were some other parts where I didn’t feel like I could be successful, but this one just felt right.”
His interpretation of the character Arthur was like “Jimmy Swaggart, Leo Tolstoy, [Fidel] Castro, the Dalai Lama and Josef Mengele in a blender,” the “Before Sunrise” icon previously shared. “That was the fun part: What if Steve Jobs was a villain?” Co-star Isaac also gave his own twist on Marvel hero Moon Knight in the “Character Study” series. The ‘Star Wars’ graduate presented a ‘fiddlier’ version of his alter ego and also changed the character’s accent, although the script ‘wasn’t necessarily written that way at all’.
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