By George Bate
The next Marvel Disney+ series is nearly here, with Moon Knight set to premiere in a little over a week’s time. The series follows Steven Grant, a shy and gentle gift shop worker in London who struggles with blackouts, hallucinations, and lost time. As comic fans will know, Grant is actually just one of the personalities in Marc Spector, a character with dissociative identity disorder.
Grant has been reimagined here, having previously been a Wall Street finance analyst in New York City, not an English man like here. In a recent interview with Radio Times, star Oscar Isaac revealed that the change was his idea, starting with describing his initial reservations about taking on the role:
“Is this the right thing to do?’ I thought, ‘I shouldn’t do it. Maybe maybe. I had just kinda got out of the whole, you know, big machinery of Star Wars. And I was like, ‘I just really want to do character studies. And I don’t know.’”
Isaac said that the multiple personalities and facets of the character intrigued him as a performer, presenting a unique challenge and undertaking for the award winning actor. He then went on to reveal that the initial scripts didn’t portray Grant/Moon Knight as the gentle Englishman seen in the trailers:
“It wasn’t necessarily written that way at all. And so I thought, ‘OK, well, let me see what Kevin [Feige] says about this.’ And so I had a meeting with Kevin, I said, ‘This is how I’d want to do it.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, OK, go for it.’ It’s funny, because afterwards he told me they didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And they weren’t sure it was going to work at all. But you know, in the end I’m glad we did that, because everyone says it kind of makes the show.”
Isaac is a high profile actor, especially after his prominent role in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, so it makes sense that Marvel Studios would allow him to have a degree of creative input on the project.
Moon Knight premieres March 30.
Source: Radio Times
Images courtesy of Marvel Studios and Disney