The last time Oscar Isaac played a character in the Marvel universe it was, quite literally, the end of the world. Years ago he donned a massive blue body-suit to battle Charles Xavier’s mutants in X-Men: Apocalypse as the titular doom-tastic villain. It was a film that didn’t exactly hit the heights of previous X-Men outings, and a character that didn’t exactly play into Isaac’s talents. But now, with MCU streaming series Moon Knight, Isaac is about to enter the world of Marvel once more – playing a brutal vigilante with multiple personas, from Steven Grant, to Marc Spector, to a supernatural crimefighter connected to the Ancient Egyptian god Khonshu. This time, he’s getting much more to do.
Following his Apocalypse experience, and his years working on the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Isaac was looking to take a step back from behemoth franchises. “Often on these big movies it can feel like you’re building the plane on the runway,” Isaac tells Empire. “The idea of getting back to ‘handmade’ films, character studies… I was desperate for that feeling.” It wasn’t long before Moon Knight offered him the best of both worlds. “It felt ‘handmade’,” he says of the Disney+ series. “And it’s the first legitimate Marvel character-study since Iron Man.” Beyond that, he saw the chance to go all-out on a Marvel character like no other. “I thought, ‘Maybe I can hijack this thing. Maybe this is the chance to do something really fucking nutty on a major stage.’”
For the actor, it was the complexity of the character – a man dealing with dissociative identity disorder – that really drew him in. “What I love most about this thing is that it’s an exploration of a mind that doesn’t know itself,” he explains. “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.” Apocalypse is over – Moon Knight is ready to rise.
Read Empire’s full Moon Knight feature in this month’s issue – talking to stars Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and May Calamawy, writer Jeremy Slater, director Mohamed Diab, Marvel boss Kevin Feige and more about the arrival of the MCU’s wildest hero yet, with tons of exclusive new images. On sale Thursday 17 February, and available to pre-order online here. Moon Knight streams on Disney+ from March 30.