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If you think villains are important to a successful superhero movie, they’re at least three times as important to a superhero television series. TV villains have to be big enough and bad enough to cause chaos for up to six hours of content. Only the best of the best can run that marathon of mayhem — and you can count Moon Knight’s Arthur Harrow among them.
Ethan Hawke’s supervillain is unlike any we’ve seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to date. He’s a calm and collected cult leader who just wants to follow the orders of his chosen deity Ammit, the Egyptian demoness also known as the Devourer of the Dead. But Hawke’s evildoer is different in another, much more impactful way. Unlike other villains of Marvel’s Disney+ era, like Agatha Harkness or Kingpin, Arthur Harrow is an obscure, one-and-done villain who hasn’t appeared in a comic in close to 40 years. Hawke, a two-time Oscar nominee for writing, was basically given carte blanche when crafting his performance as the harrowing Arthur. The result is a foe that’s just as unpredictable as Moon Knight.
Ahead of Moon Knight’s premiere, Decider got the chance to speak with Ethan Hawke about working with Oscar Isaac, joining the MCU, and finding reason within Harrow’s madness.
Decider: You’ve previously said that Oscar Isaac himself asked you to join the cast of Moon Knight. How did he do that? Did he text you?
Ethan Hawke: We’d never met before. We just bumped into each other at a coffee shop during the pandemic, masked up and everything. And I asked him what he was working on and he told me this, and he started getting really passionate about it. He’s like, “You should play the bad guy in this!” And I was like, “Well listen, call Kevin Feige and if you guys are serious, make me an offer I can’t refuse.”
It seems like every actor, especially ones of your stature and longevity, are appearing in Marvel movies. Did you ever envision joining the MCU?
Not really, but I don’t really think like that. How do I put it? I like working with other actors or directors. I don’t think, “Who’s making the movie?” People always ask me, “Do you want to be in a Marvel movie?” And I would say, “Well, it depends on who is directing it.” That’s how my brain works. I love science fiction. I love all genres of movies, so it makes sense as long as I had a good part and I could work with good people.
I know they didn’t want you to read the script before you came on board, because they wanted you to really bring your own ideas for Arthur Harrow. How did you develop the character?
In a lot of ways that was the most fun part of this, was being invited into the kitchen with them to try to daydream about what Moon Knight could be. It’s not connected to the adventures, it’s not connected to these other storylines. We really could tell our own story and we had a big canvas to do it, a six-hour story to tell. And so the architecture of the story was laid out. Kevin had a plan for what Moon Knight was going to be at first — the beginning, middle, and end of the story — but the details of the characters were all still just sketches. The comics don’t have a definitive [Moon Knight] villain, even though Moon Knight himself changes throughout the comics with his backstory and different things, so we really just had to look at the stories and study Moon Knight and figure out what the best way to tell the story was. I enjoyed getting to come up with my own villain.
Your attention to detail really comes across in the show. Arthur Harrow feels very fleshed out. You understand his point of view. When creating him, how specific did you get into his beliefs — because he’s essentially a cult leader —
Yeah, that’s exactly what he is. He’s a cult leader. He’s a follower, really. He’s just an acolyte. He’s a deacon in the church of Ammit, so that’s how I thought about him and that’s where I came up with the idea that he pours glass in his shoes. A lot of people who go way down the spiritual path come up with some crazy ways to exercise their self-mastery: overcoming of pursuit of pleasure, overcoming fear of pain. So, I found that aspect of him really interesting.
You also get to work with Oscar Isaac as he plays two different characters. How do you approach scenes with Steven Grant differently from scenes with Marc Spector?
Yeah, [Arthur is] trying to talk to the essence of the man. Arthur thinks he knows more about Marc than Marc knows [about himself]. I’m always trying to speak to the absolute essence of him. So in that way, even when he’s playing Moon Knight, or Mr. Knight, or Marc or Steven, it’s all these different personas I had to relate to, but I felt like [Arthur] saw through all that.
New episodes of Moon Knight premiere on Disney+ on Wednesdays at 3 a.m. ET
