Moon Knight star Oscar Isaac says Disney+’s upcoming MCU series is more a character study than a traditional superhero story. Talking with Empire about his experience shooting Moon Knight, Isaac also underlined how the series has a unique tone, as it explores the fractured psyche of its titular character.
While describing his experience bringing Moon Knight to live-action for the first time, Isaac said that what was so refreshing about coming back to superhero media is that the upcoming series felt almost “handmade.” As Isaac puts it, he “was desperate for that feeling” that only a character study can bring, and excited with the opportunity “to do something really f**king nutty on a major stage.” Isaac goes as far as to say that Moon Knight is “the first legitimate Marvel character study since Iron Man.”
One could argue with Isaac that other Marvel productions also work as character studies – WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier come to mind. However, we cannot dispute that Isaac’s return to superhero media must feel very different this time around, having last played a Marvel character when he starred as the titular villain in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, a non-MCU film and the least commercially successful of the X-Men prequel films.
Isaac also discussed how the upcoming series focuses on the titular character's mental health. In the comics, Moon Knight is a hero who deals with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which plays into his role as the vessel of an Egyptian god. So far, the series' trailers promise a faithful adaptation, visually representing elements of the multiple alters living in Isaac's character's system, and that's part of the appeal Moon Knight had to Isaac, as it gave the star a chance to explore a complex character:
“What I love most about this thing is that it’s an exploration of a mind that doesn’t know itself. A human being that doesn’t know his own brain. I found that really moving: what the mind is capable of as far as survival. But the workload was massive: the technical challenge of embodying these different characters, physically, the way I manifest my body… It required a lot of energy.”
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige also promised that the series will mark a "tonal shift" in the MCU, with Moon Knight serving as a darker turn into more mature themes for the series. While the show officially received a TV-14 rating as opposed to TV-MA, Feige described the series to Empire as "loud and brutal", calling it a "different thing" from the projects Disney+ and Marvel have explored so far. Perhaps with a TV-14 rating, we won't see quite as much violence as other Marvel projects of the past — hey there, The Punisher — but fans should still expect something new and unique as Marvel moves further into Phase Four.
Moon Knight premieres on Disney+ on March 30.