Ethan Hawke had turned down offers to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) before, but it was a moment of serendipity that got him into Moon Knight, a six-episode Marvel television series on Disney+ Hotstar.
“I've been watching this whole Marvel thing, you know, balloon over the last couple of decades. I have four kids, so I've seen an inordinate amount of these movies multiple times, and I've always wondered what it was like to be in them,” during a recent virtual roundtable interview with Asian Pacific journalists.
“They (Marvel) have approached me before in the past, but nothing that felt like it could be something I could be successful in," he added.
Then, according to him, a “strange series of events' 'happened during the Covid-19 pandemic changed his mind.
“I was zooming with (Moon Knight director) Mohammed Diab and his wife about making a movie that they were writing,” recalled the 51-year-old, who praised Diab’s Egyptian films as “brilliant”.
Then one day, the Egyptian director told him that he had to drop out of that project because he just got hired to do a “big Marvel job”.
After telling Diab to ‘go do it and call me in a couple years when you're done’, Hawke went out to get a cup of coffee at a tiny coffee shop two blocks from his house, and just happened to run into Oscar Isaac.
“He told me he was doing this new Marvel thing, and he was just speaking so passionately about it. Then he said I should play the villain,” Hawke recalled.
Then when Isaac told him that Diab was directing the series, Hawke put two and two together and told Isaac that if they were serious about getting him to come on board, then “get Kevin Fiege to call me”.
“By dinnertime, Kevin Fiege had called my agent, and it was on!” Hawke said with a laugh. “I just trusted the synchronicity of that. It was just now or never.”
Moon Knight revolves around the Marvel superhero created by writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin in 1975’s Werewolf By Night #32. Oscar Isaac plays Steven Grant, a mild-mannered gift shop assistant in a London museum who finds out that he not only suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), but one of his multiple identities is that of Marc Spector, a former mercenary who serves as the avatar for Khonshu, the Egyptian God of the moon.
A harrowing villain
If Moon Knight is already an unknown entity to you, then Hawke's character, main villain Dr Arthur Harrow, might be even more obscure. In the comics, he is a genius scientist who carried out experiments on pain theory based on old Nazi experiments. The TV version, however, bears very little resemblance to its comics counterpart, being more of a cult leader who is hell-bent on inflicting his own sense of justice onto the world.
“I liked that (Harrrow) looks at himself as spiritually enlightened. He thinks that ridding the world of pain would be good and noble act. But what he's missing is the fact that if you don't have pain, you don't have life, that life being alive is to suffer,” Hawke explained.
“In a way, his biggest crime is spiritual pride – he feels that he knows the truth so much that he doesn't need to listen to anybody else. He's so sure of himself... and that kind of pride leads to massive blind spots and arrogance."
What Hawke found was so unique about Moon Knight was that, throughout the history of superhero villains, ‘mental illness’ has always been used to create villains, but here, it is the hero who is struggling with it, which Hawke says “left this huge openness to what the villain would be like.”
“I then realised that Harrow had to be the opposite of whatever Moon Knight was. If he was constant like the moon, then I needed to be constant like the sun. If he was fractured and broken, then I needed to be soft and gentle,” Hawke recalled.
“I just started coming up with a character that was part monk and part doctor, and who saw himself as enlightened.
“And you know, whenever you think you're enlightened, you’ve probably already lost the plot. There are very few people that actually ARE (enlightened) and they don't usually advertise it!”
In last week’s first episode of new Marvel superhero series Moon Knight, we were introduced to the villain in the most, er, harrowing way, as the series opens with a beautifully shot sequence of the cult leader-like figure preparing for his day by putting broken glass in his shoes and walking out in them.
Hawke explained that he came up with the idea of Harrow having broken glass in his shoes after researching historical spiritual figures and finding that many of them used to inflict suffering on themselves as a way to achieve enlightenment.
He also reckons it is a scene that probably would not have made it onto the screen if Moon Knight had been a two-hour-long movie rather than a six episode TV series on Disney+ Hotstar.
“I had a much bigger canvas to play around with as an actor. I just had the time for those kinds of weird little moments that you might not have had time for (in a feature film),” he said.
The first episode of Moon Knight is now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar, with new episodes every Wednesday, 4pm.
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