A British Person’s Review of Oscar Isaac’s Moon Knight Accent

Moon Knight is a collection that goes to some quite unfathomable locations for a Marvel TV present. It’s darker and extra mysterious than maybe something for the reason that studio’s Netflix endeavors. It, with quite appreciable restraint, chooses to not continuously reference its place in Marvel Cinematic Universe. Perhaps most unfathomable of all, nonetheless, is that it asks you to consider that Oscar Isaac can ship a convincing English accent.

Moon Knight’s premiere episode, “The Goldfish Problem,” largely focuses on introducing us to one of many two distinct personalities Isaac performs within the collection: Steven Grant, a mild-mannered, geeky present retailer clerk at… effectively, one of London’s main museums, it’s arduous to say which given the present’s grasp of town’s geography is quite circumspect. That issues much less although right here. What we’re inquisitive about isn’t the accuracy of Moon Knight’s location work, however simply how convincingly Isaac can pull off a London accent.

As io9’s resident speaker of the Queen’s English—aka a bunch of nigh-on incomprehensible nonsense—it falls on me to be decide and jury, for after years of the inverse within the MCU, the place British actors like Benedict Cumberbatch, Charlie Cox, and Tom Holland purloin American heroes and their accents like British Imperialism continues to be alive and effectively, ultimately we have now a notable occasion of somebody making an attempt to purloin certainly one of ours. Coming into the collection, I was admittedly hesitant. It didn’t assist that Marvel mainly formed most of its Moon Knight advertising out of a single learn from Isaac’s Steven, “I can’t tell the difference between my waking life and dreams,” delivered so scenery-chewingly that Dick Van Dyke would go and dig a grave simply to go begin spinning in it.

Thankfully, within the bigger context of the collection, Isaac’s accent works quite charmingly, and never simply because it’s popping out of Oscar Isaac’s mouth. The exaggeration offers Steven the type of bumbling persona that transforms the collection into one thing of an oddball buddy comedy the place Isaac performs each side of the duo, a pointy distinction to the little snippets of Marc Spector we get within the first episode. But regardless of that exaggeration, there’s something that feels actual about Steven’s lilts and twangs. The moments when he litters his dialogue with an off-the-cuff comment like “laters gators”—which, frankly, I’ve personally by no means heard anybody say earlier than, however it sounds within the ballpark of the type of random rhyming slang you’d count on from the English—are pretty. Perhaps most precisely and weirdly essentially the most endearing of all of it, is simply the sheer quantity of informal swearing that Isaac peppers his dialogue with. From an “Oh bollocks!” or “Bloody ‘ell!” here, to calling himself a bit of a knob when dressing for a dinner date there, in a sea of exaggerated Britishism it’s the lackadaisical method to mild cursing that feels most British of all right here. You simply don’t get that with different Marvel heroes, and albeit, it’ll be a disgrace to unfastened a few of that at any time when Moon Knight does discover himself enmeshed extra deeply with the broader MCU connective tissue.

I’m not going to attempt to make some profound, sweeping assertion right here, a grandiose try and challenge Isaac’s accent work as notably incisive or thematically basic to Moon Knight’s textual content. In the top, it’s nonetheless fairly foolish, and that works largely as a result of, effectively, have you ever heard us Brits? We all sound a bit foolish. Hearing that mirrored again at you by one of the vital good-looking males on the planet as the most recent in Marvel’s ever-growing vanguard of streaming superheroes doesn’t must be greater than that. And that’s good, innit?

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