After starring in indie films and auteur dramas — as well as big-budget franchise installments like “X-Men: Apocalypse” and the “Star Wars” trilogy — Isaac was “desperate” to return to character studies. “Often on these big movies it can feel like you’re building the plane on the runway,” Isaac told Empire. “The idea of getting back to ‘handmade’ films, character studies…I was desperate for that feeling.” And then along came Disney+’s new Marvel collaboration, “Moon Knight.” Not quite “Inside Llewyn Davis,” but Isaac still found an indie quality to the limited series. “It felt ‘handmade,’” Isaac explained. “It’s the first legitimate Marvel character study since ‘Iron Man.’ I thought, ‘Maybe I can hijack this thing. Maybe this is the chance to do something really fucking nutty on a major stage.’”
Isaac continued, “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.” The six-episode limited series, co-starring Ethan Hawke and May Calamawy, premieres March 30 on Disney+. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige teased that the series pushes the “boundaries” of the MCU. “There are moments when Moon Knight is wailing on another character, and it is loud and brutal, and the knee-jerk reaction is, ‘We’re gonna pull back on this, right?’ No. We’re not pulling back,” Feige said. “There’s a tonal shift. This is a different thing. This is ‘Moon Knight.’” Isaac previously opened up about filming “Moon Knight” during Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series. “There was a lot of room to try stuff because there wasn’t the pressure that we got to make sure we make however many hundreds of millions of dollars on the opening weekend,” he said. “So we could make it very point-of-view. We could make very weird decisions. At the moment, at least — and I don’t imagine it’s going to go backwards — it feels like that’s where more of the risk is being taken because it can, financially.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
