Ethan Hawke Digs Into Playing the MOON KNIGHT Villain, Cult Leader Arthur Harrow
We are just a week away from the premiere of the latest Marvel Disney+ series, Moon Knight. We’ve seen the awesome trailers and we have heard a bit about the show’s superhero, Steven Grant/Marc Spector, who is being portrayed by the actor Oscar Isaac. But the show’s villain, Arthur Harrow, is just as pivotal to the story, and he is being played by four-time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke.
Hawke was recently in attendance at a Moon Knight press conference, and Deadline reports that he dug into the vision of one of the show’s directors, Mohamed Diab and talked about what it was like to play a sane villain opposite a mentally ill protagonist. He explained:
“(Director) Mohamed (Diab) was really embracing his mental illness to provide an unreliable narrator. Once you’ve broken the prism of reality, everything the audience is seeing is from a skewed point of view. That’s really interesting for the villain: Am I really being seen as I am?”
He went on to say:
“The histories of movies are paved with storytellers using mental illness as a building block for the villain. (There are) countless stories of mentally ill villains, and we have a mentally ill hero. That’s fascinating: we’ve now inverted the whole process, and now as the antagonist, I can’t be crazy because the hero is crazy,” the actor added, “so, I have to find a sane lunatic or a sane malevolent source, and that was an interesting riddle for me.”
“Moon Knight follows Steven Grant, a mild-mannered man who lives a mundane life, plagued by blackouts and mysterious memories of a life somehow separate from his own. After one fateful encounter, he discovers that he has Dissociative Identity Disorder and shares a body with Marc Spector—a former mercenary and the ruthless avatar of Khonshu, the Egyptian god of the moon and vengeance. Steven must learn how to work with his alter ego as a deadly battle is played out among the powerful gods of Egypt.”
Harrow is a guy who knows how to maneuver this cosmic war, and face off against Moon Knight and Khonshu. What the villain’s end goal is here? Well, we will just have to wait and see.
Isaac was also, of course, in attendance at the press conference, and when asked what drew him to the character of Moon Knight, he said:
“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. 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.”
Moon Knight drops on Disney+ on Wednesday, March 30. Check out the clip below to get a good look at Ethan Hawke’s Arthur Harrow, and let us know if you’re getting pumped for next week!