Ethan Hawke on his role in 'Moon Knight': 'I enjoyed Arthur Harrow because I didn't think of him as a villain'

“Usually the villain is the one who suffers from mental illness, right? In our story, he is the hero”: this is how Ethan Hawke describes the narrative of Moon Knight, the new Marvel that came to Disney+. Infobae talked to the American actor about the role he played for the television series and his experience working on a large-scale production with Oscar Isaac, who gives life to the anti-hero in his live-action version and is divided between the personalities of Steven Grant and Marc Spector.

“The beautiful thing about Moon Knight is that it is darker. It's a strange story. And one of the elements that [director] Mohamed [Diab] contributed is a kind of Egyptian ethos, his knowledge of this ancient mythology, and the use of his skills as a filmmaker to take advantage of this character. Oscar also had the opportunity to play a really complicated hero,” he added.

With a long career in film, the star of Before Dawn and Training Day joined the ranks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and was “very grateful to have a job”, after everything the world has experienced in the last two years. It has been “an incredible experience” for him to have a production company behind him with the ability to bring to television a story full of fantastic elements.

“I've been performing for 30 years and I've never been on sets like this,” he observed of his participation in the filming of Moon Knight. “They are building these giant sets with a lot of extras, they have all the tools you need to make your imagination come true. So I realized very soon: if we didn't work, it was our fault.”

When asked to describe the mysterious antagonist he plays, Hawke joked that Arthur Harrow is “devilishly handsome”. He then added, seriously, that he is a man who believes that he is really saving the world and doing the right thing, but “he is a judge, jury and executioner”. In fact, the first thing you see about this character is how he recognizes goodness in people and in turn gets rid of those who have even the smallest rate of evil.

“I enjoyed the character because I didn't have to think of him as a villain. I see him as a saint, because I think that's how he saw himself,” he surmised, not to mention the importance of his dress in robes so as not to make him look like a typical antagonist in a superhero plot. “I didn't want it to look threatening. Sometimes there is nothing more frightening than a doctor or a priest, because they have something in their eyes, they know something about you that you don't know. And I wanted to build, from that, a little creepy energy, but that wasn't evil.”

Why wasn't it based on the original Arthur from the Marvel comics? It was important for Hawke to become the opposite version of Moon Knight that Oscar Isaac recreated in front of the cameras. “As he became increasingly committed to the aspect of this character's mental illness and dissociated identity disorder, we needed a villain who was the opposite of that. So if he was going to be insane, I had to be sane,” he added.

The actor said that this new Marvel series is going through its strangest phase towards the middle of the season: “You start to realize that you don't have a reliable narrator, that maybe Arthur Harrow wasn't exactly who he told you he was,” he analyzed. There are even scenes in which he plays the protagonist's doctor.

Would Ethan Hawke be willing to return to MCU?

“Yes! With me it always depends on who I'm working with,” he added. Although he stressed that Marvel films are important because of the level of audience they attract and the stories they develop, at age 51 he considers that his interest in a role also depends on the people who will accompany him on the adventure. In this case, her Moon Knight co-stars were key to making the decision.

“One of the interesting things in life is that I used to be the youngest person on set,” he recalled. “Now I see in Oscar a fully mature artist, who thinks about acting the same way as I do, who is at an earlier point in his career but comes with such passionate and experienced energy,” he commented and also filled May Calamawy (Layla El-Faouly in the series) with praise: “This is a great opportunity for her. She has wide eyes and is willing to learn [...] It was fun for me to see the two of them work, to see how they thought.”

So Ethan Hawke would agree to do another season again, but he left in the hands of viewers the possibility of a continuation. “If the show is successful and the audience likes it, I would love to [go back]... I think we can do even better, so I find that interesting. But only if the public wanted it too,” he concluded.

The first episode of Moon Knight was released this March 30th in Disney+.

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