Moon Knight

With the premiere of Marvel's Moon Knight on Disney+, fans will at last get a chance to see the first live-action iteration of a Marvel Comics character who ...

I think he blends in nicely with the rest of the MCU. As a fanboy, I can’t wait to see where he lands next.” I don’t think there’s too many corners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that Moon Knight could not touch if that’s where he goes next. While we haven’t seen the full slate of episodes yet, it doesn’t seem likely that Spector is going to page any Avengers who happen to be around for help.

Next, to our hero, Steven Grant, who clearly suffers from some sort of disruptive sleep disorder, to the point that he straps himself in to bed each night and ...

In what was almost a one-man show, the success of this first episode boiled down to whether you believe the professionally good-looking, charismatic A-lister as a slightly pathetic, friendless mess of a man. Tie-ins with Doctor Strange, given that it’s the next Marvel film on the slate, and Blade seem most likely. The closing moments of the episode, with Steven alone in an empty museum save for a rampaging hell hound, were equally jumpy. Unremarkable for the first episode of a new character’s series, perhaps, but given MCU bossKevin Feige’s comments about Moon Knight sticking aroundto cross over into other films and series, that will definitely change before the season is out. I even stopped thinking about his ropey accent as the episode went on, although I had to laugh when Layla bellowed “What is with this accent?” down the phone, and I still can’t quite get Paul Rudd in Forgetting Sarah Marshall out of my head when I hear Steven talk. I jest, of course.

No you're not dreaming – the Moon Knight stars stopped by to talk all things lunar on the Empire Podcast. Read the interview here.

And I kind of thought, “Alright, if I'm going to do this, what kind of character what I want to see in the Avengers?" And I just thought it'd be really funny to be like, “If Peter Sellers was asked to be in a Marvel movie, what would he do? Hawke: When I think back on it now, that dare question, I think back on when Richard Linklater first asked me to make a movie for 12 years [Boyhood]. He's like, "I want to make a movie over the next 12 years". Like, okay. I mean, I am a Jewish character, you know, he's a Jew from Chicago, Mark Spector – and Steven Grant, a lot of the voice and all that was modelled off of that kind of North East London where a lot of the Jewish population is, and so that that was a really important thing. It's just a little boring, and I love to watch somebody take it there. Especially in a trailer where you just have one line, so you can kind of isolate it and be like, that sucks, that's good, that's not, you know? It was really important for me to think about what that was like through the lens of an Arab woman and not just think about it as someone from the West, because it's really different. We had a leader in Mohamed, to kind of be our guide through it and to teach us, and his Egyptian films, for people that don't know them, are just incredible. And I hope that people from the Middle East kind of remember that as well, and around the world. I was asking the writers and directors and everybody – so if this is actually a comic book and it was a full page drawing of my character, because often they would do that with the villain, and give him a full-page introductory mysterious drawing, it was like, what would it be? And I was like, "oh", and it just got cooler and weirder. Oscar really pushed the show to take mental illness seriously and to take his character’s situation seriously, and that gave the show a point of view. It was kind of randomly set in the UK, and I asked, "Why is it set in London?" And they're like, well, we've got too many heroes in New York. So he's an expat in London, whatever, we'll make it work.