Who needs a multiverse of madness when you’ve got “Moon Knight”?
Marvel Studios’ latest miniseries for Disney+ has enough multiple personalities and crazy visions to satisfy any superhero fan’s need for bent reality. Based on the white-costumed character of the same name, who has undergone multiple incarnations since his 1975 comic book debut, the series stars Oscar Isaac in (at least) four different roles. His sleep-deprived head is filled with disembodied voices and then — just as the central story about ancient Egyptian deities, their avatars and religious fanatics starts making sense — the six-episode series abruptly upends itself halfway through.
Along with Isaac’s mild-mannered English museum nerd Steven Grant, mysterious American mercenary Marc Spector, spectral Moon Knight and the more sophisticated alter ego Mr. Knight, the show features Ethan Hawke as cult leaderArthur Harrowand Egyptian Palestinian actress May Calamawy (“Ramy”) as Layla, Marc’s ex-wife and an accomplished tomb raider herself.
“It just seemed like there was a real opportunity to do something completely different in this, particularly in the (Marvel Cinematic Universe),” said Isaac, who has already stood out with genre roles in “Star Wars,” “Dune” and “X-Men: Apocalypse,” during an online news conference. “To use Egyptian iconography, the superhero genre and this language to talk about this real internal struggle that this person is having.”
When we first meet Isaac’s multifaceted character, Egyptology expert Steven doesn’t initially understand that he shares his body with Marc, and that they’re both avatars of the bird-skulled moon/vengeance god Khonshu. This leads to wild confrontations in Egypt, London and Switzerland (mostly shot in Hungary, with desert locations filmed in Jordan) against Harrow and his followers, who worship the rival justice-dispensing Egyptian deity Ammit.
But “Moon Knight” is really a story about people and their issues, the talent insisted. Mohamed Diab, whose amazing 2016 feature “Clash” captured civil unrest in his native Egypt from the confines of a police van, served as one of the executive producers for “Moon Knight” and directed four episodes.
“Not because it is Egyptian — and this is something important to express, for sure — but I felt like this is an extension of my movies,” Diab told The Chronicle in a separate video interview. “You strip down all the action and everything that is glamorous about the show, and I love the drama between Marc and Steven. I like the love triangle between Marc and Steven and Layla. I love someone trying to know more about their identity and discovering all those secrets.”
Steven and Marc constantly battle for control of their body, and argue with each other anytime the odd man out appears in a mirror, polished knife blade or other reflective surface. Diab reported that Isaac felt he could only play one persona per day during the first two weeks of shooting, but then got in the swing of jumping between Marc and Steven. The actor’s brother, Michael Hernandez, stood in for the other role during the gnarly interactions.
It was very helpful to have someone who’s not only a great actor but shares my DNA to play off of,” Isaac noted. “Something I didn’t anticipate was how technically demanding that was going to be. Having to decide which character I was going to play first, then try to block that out, give my brother notes and then do the scene, switch characters and figure it out.”
Isaac’s swinging personalities left Hawke with a conundrum: how to play the show’s deranged antagonist when the hero is clearly suffering from dissociative identity disorder.
“Normally, the villain’s the insane one jumping all over the place,” Hawke told The Chronicle in another video interview. “I realized that I needed to be the voice of sanity or, in a way, his doctor. And what is more scary than a doctor? Doctors and priests scare the hell out of me! So I tried to come up with a combination character who is part monk — with these robes, gentle and kind — and part doctor who is studying him, perhaps, with a malevolent intention.”
Hawke may have angered fans a few years ago when he rightly pointed out that superhero moviesweren’t in the same ballparkas the works of Ingmar Bergman. But his first experience with Marvel satisfied his artistic soul.
“In my experience, the bigger the budget, the more fear there is in the room and the less they cultivate a sense of creativity,” Hawke said. “But Marvel’s really opposite. As long as you color in their lines, they give you a really long leash. They let Oscar and I play and gave a lot of freedom to Mohamed, and let us try our best to carve a new path here for ‘Moon Knight.’ I was surprised at that.”
Diab concurred that working with Marvel was marked by mutual creative respect. A big part of that was getting Cairo seen as he knows it.
“Egyptians always see themselves portrayed in an orientalist way that makes us look exotic,” said Diab, whorecently criticized howhis homeland was presented in“Wonder Woman 1984.”“It was very important to flip that and show Egypt as real as it is. May’s character was not Egyptian at the beginning. Then we pushed and May was there to develop her and make her absolutely Egyptian.
“Cairo is very primitive; we see the pyramids in every movie,” Diab added. “It’s one of the biggest cities in the world, 20 million people! Very urban, skyscrapers. It was important to show Egypt normal, just like the rest of the world.”
Doesn’t sound crazy at all.
“Moon Knight”(TV-14)周三首映,在迪斯尼+ 3月30日。Subsequent episodes released Wednesdays through May 4.