Fresh off the success of Marvel’s Moon Knight and the horror hit The Black Phone, Ethan Hawke is having quite the year. While the actor has appeared in horror films before — in fact, he’s even worked with The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson before — it was a bit of a surprise to see him in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, given his conflicted views on superhero movies in the past.

But after clarifying previously that he sees no difference between “high art and low art,” Hawke said in a new interview with IndieWire that his main motivation to do Moon Knight — in which he played the villainous cult leader Arthur Harrow — was to alert Marvel to his brand of acting. It happened at the encouragement of his daughter Maya Hawke, who told him that it’s poor form to sit on the outside and tell everyone that “their sandbox is bad.”

Hawke said that he’s nobody to dictate what “young people” should and should not watch, and he just wanted to experience the world of Marvel for himself. He arrived at the conclusion that while Marvel is “actor-friendly” it might not be “director-friendly.” In his own words:

“That group of people is extremely actor-friendly. They might not be director-friendly, and that could be what Scorsese and Coppola are talking about. But they love actors. I think Kevin Feige had a great thing happen with Robert Downey Jr. and he understood that Downey’s passion was a large part of the success. When actors are excited by a part, audiences get excited about watching them. Feige understood the algorithm there, so they’re extremely respectful toward the process. The best thing about Moon Knight for me was Oscar’s performance. It’s a gonzo thing that happens to have a giant budget — a pretty out-there performance.”

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Hawke made a reference to the controversial comments made by directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola about superhero movies not being real movies. Scorsese famously compared them to theme park rides in a 2019 interview with Empire, and Coppola went a step further, and at a press event in France in the same year, called Marvel films “despicable.”

The actor defended both Scorsese and Coppola’s comments about Marvel (or, at least their right to make them), and said that he appreciates “the elder statesmen of the community reminding people not to set the bar too low,” because if they “don’t come out to tell their truth about how there are more important things than making money, who’s going to?”

Hawke might be onto something. It’s true that while actors have largely appeared to have had a good time working with Marvel (provided you don’t ask Edward Norton or Terrence Howard), several filmmakers have had infamous showdowns with the studio. Patty Jenkins dropped out of directing Thor: The Dark World; Joss Whedon has spoken often about the pushback he faced on Avengers: Age of Ultron; Edgar Wright quit Ant-Man weeks before filming; Ava DuVernay passed on Black Panther; and most recently, Derrickson dropped out of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. All cited creative differences. The six-episode Moon Knight was directed by Mohamed Diab and the filmmaker duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. Benson and Moorhead, in fairness, are re-teaming with Marvel on the upcoming second season of Loki.

But Hawke said that he was careful not to tie himself down to the MCU after Moon Knight — Marvel typically locks actors down for multiple projects — and is now awaiting the release of The Last Movie Stars, his six-part documentary series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, due out on HBO Max on July 21. You can watch an interview with Hawke talking about Moon Knight here: