Moon Knight is the newest Marvel series on Disney+, and it’s been making waves. For one thing, there’s Oscar Isaac’s stellar performance as lead character Mark Spector, a mercenary who suffers from dissociative identity disorder. Marc has been empowered by the Egyptian moon god Khonshu to mete out justice on his behalf, but the job is severely complicated by the character’s shifting personalities; one of them is a bookish London museum worker named Steven Grant, and there may be a third one we have yet to meet.
It’s hard to think of another Marvel property that has depended so entirely on an actor’s performance. Everything about Moon Knight is top notch, but if Isaac wasn’t pulling off his part, the whole thing would crumble. Fortunately for everyone, he is bringing his A game.
Moon Knight director sings Oscar Isaac’s praises
Mohamed Diab is one of the main creative forces behind Moon Knight. The Egyptian filmmaker is an executive producer on the series and directed four of its six episodes, including this week’s Cairo-based “The Friendly Type.” Diab famously put together a 200-page presentation with his wife and producer Sarah Goher to pitch their idea for Moon Knight to Marvel, and clearly it resonated, because here we are.
Recently Diab talked with Looper about what it was like to create this show with Isaac, who was initially reluctant to sign on. “He wanted to do something small and intimate. To achieve all that in that big scale, I’m so proud of that,” Diab said. “Definitely, Oscar carries the show on his shoulders, and it was a marvel seeing him transforming. The camera pans right and left and he has his reflection camera, and he changes — there’s no tricks there. He actually becomes a different person. I always say that he even when he’s Marc, he gets a bit taller. It’s the demeanor changing. When you were paired with great talents like Oscar and Ethan , and May , you’re lucky.”
It’s all the more impressive because, according to Diab, Isaac in real-life is nothing like either Marc Spector or Steven Grant. The actor is committed to full transformation, and he’s pulling it off. “He’s playing Steven and he’s playing Marc and none of them are Oscar Isaac. He’s completely different than the two of them,” Diab said. “He’s playing two completely different characters that are far away from him, and he can do a lot more, too. He’s one, like Ethan, they’re not here to put on the cape and get figurines. No, no, no. They’re here to do something special.”
Moon Knight is currently getting great reviews from audiences and critics alike. We’d say that something special is happening on that show, indeed.
Accent coach reacts to Oscar Isaac’s English accent
One element of Moon Knight that had the internet buzzing shortly after the show’s first trailer dropped is the English accent Oscar Isaac uses when in his Steven Grant persona. The reactions ranged from love to scorn to riotous laughter.
As it turns out, the choice to use the English accent for Steven was an idea that Isaac himself pitched as a way of helping differentiate his multiple personalities. Hollywood accent and dialect coach Jack Wallace recently weighed in on Isaac’s English accent, picking apart how accurate (or not) it is. Wallace was born in the UK, and is an expert on its various accents. As it turns out, he actually had much more good to say about Isaac’s English accent than bad. Watch below:
In particular, Wallace praised the way that Isaac used the accent in natural ways. Wallace explained that often when doing a new accent, actors will fall back on monotonous choice (e.g. turning every single T into a glottal stop), but that Isaac is keeping enough variety in his pronunciations to make it sound realistic. He’s also using a variety of tones and inflections as he goes through the character’s different moods, which is something that is apparently difficult to pull off.
“Yeah, I think that in terms of the world of this show and what they’re trying to achieve that he’s actually doing a really good job of this accent,” Wallace told IGN. “And I think it surprised a lot of people because people expect there to be an accent, whereas we’ve gone for a slightly more out of the box target for this one. But I think he’s doing all the things he needs to to hit the target that has been assigned.”
That’s not to say that Wallace had no critiques of the show, however. “They go to town with like ‘English slang,'” Wallace said. “And rather than saying ‘nose’ he’s like ‘up the old nozzle.’ I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone refer to it as a nozzle. I know people do, but it’s pretty heavy-handed with its dialect word choice. But that’s much more to do with the writing than everything else.”
Moon Knight’s third episode is out now on Disney+. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
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