Ethan Hawke on Playing a Perfectly Sane Baddie in Marvel’s Moon Knight

In a daring transfer, Disney+ and Marvel Studios snagged one among Hollywood’s most seasoned unbiased movie results in play the antagonist in Moon Knight. At a latest Moon Knight press conference attended by io9, Ethan Hawke mentioned how working with Marvel has actually modified his perspective on blockbuster motion pictures.

“In my whole experience, usually when there’s a huge budget, there’s a tremendous amount of fear and the people in charge are incredibly controlling and creativity is reduced. In my entire experience with Grant [Curtis, Moon Knight’s executive producer] and with Marvel, it’s the opposite of that,” the actor stated. “There was a lot of playfulness and a lot of willingness to fail and a lot of willingness to have bad ideas because you can’t find a great idea if you don’t and make mistakes.”

But principally… it was Oscar Isaac stopping him at a coffee shop that impressed him to tackle the position of mysterious New Age chief Arthur Harrow. Turns out their kindred indie inclinations actually vibed on this specific darker take on a superhero story. “I sensed it from Oscar from the get go. There was a huge passion to contribute. And when an actor has a strong hit on a character, when they have something they want to contribute and you follow it, good things happen,” he stated. “Oscar had a hit on this guy, on DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) and how it could be useful. And that, combined with the architecture we had already—that’s what collaboration is.”

There’s positively a David Koresh-meets-New Age poisonous positivity employee power round Harrow that Hawke masterfully makes use of to gaslight Isaac’s Steven Grant into questioning whether or not or not he ought to belief the traditional deity and voices in his head. Hawke defined, “The histories of movies are paved with storytellers using mental illness as a building block for the villain and we have a mentally ill hero. And that’s fascinating because we’ve now inverted the whole process.”

Hawke figured his take can be to play it as helpfully ableist, “Now as the antagonist, I can’t be crazy because the hero’s crazy. So I have to kind of find a sane lunatic or a sane, malevolent force. And that’s that was an interesting riddle for me to figure out how to be in dynamics with what Oscar was doing.”

It was intentional from the begin to have the villain set on protecting Steven from realizing he had energy as Moon Knight, which director Mohamed Diab inspired Hawke to make use of as motivation. “Mohamed was really embracing mental illness as a way to create an unreliable narrator. And once you’ve broken the prism of reality, you realize everything that the audience is seeing is from a skewed point of view. I think that was our riddle, and we came up with somebody who was trying to save the world. And in his mind, he’s Saint Harrow. He thinks he’s going to be, you know, part of the great solution.”

We love a villain period. Moon Knight would be the first time we see Hawke dive into a brand new arena of antagonist roles, nevertheless it received’t be the final. In June, he’ll be starring in horror film The Black Phone, enjoying a toddler assassin dubbed “the Grabber”—a chilling position that appears to be vastly totally different than Harrow in Moon Knight.

Moon Knight premieres on Disney+ March 30.

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