Moon Knight directors break down that twist ending

The latest episode of Moon Knight featured the biggest twist ending of the series to date. It should go without saying, but we are going to be getting into SPOILERS for “The Tomb” here. If you haven’t watched it…well, go watch it. Then come back so we can discuss, because the episode’s directors — Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead — have opened up about what went into filming the episode’s climactic sequence. It was a doozy, and there’s a lot to dissect.

Moon Knight directors break down inspirations behind the twist-ending of “The Tomb”

The final 15 minutes of Moon Knight’s fourth episode ended with a real mind-bender. After being shot by Dr. Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), our hero Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) falls backward into a pool of water, sinking deep into the abyss. When he wakes up, he’s drugged up and in a mental institution, surrounded by characters and imagery from the adventure we’ve been watching. It was a brief jolt to the senses that called the entire show into question. Were all those events in Marc Spector’s mind? Is Moon Knight even real?

By the end of the sequence we get the feeling that yes, everything has actually happened. After freeing his alternate personality Steven from a sarcophagus in the hospital, the two Oscar Isaacs hug it out and make for the exit, only to come face-to-face with Taweret, the hippo-headed Egyptian goddess of fertility, childbirth and rejuvenation. Cue hilarious screaming.

Entertainment Weekly interviewed directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the masterminds behind this trippy sequence, which was directly inspired by a particular run of the Moon Knight comics. “[The end of episode 4] came from wanting to do the least expected thing and completely disorient the audience, while also being completely true to the character that we’ve built over four episodes,” Moorhead said. “Also the comic book character: There’s a run of Moon Knight written by Jeff Lemire, and [Greg] Smallwood did the art, and it has a lot of similar feelings and visuals to what happens at the end of episode 4. So we’re really glad to be able to honor the original comics, the ones that we were the most drawn to when we were trying to crack Moon Knight. That’s where the inspiration came from, especially visually and tonally.”

“[T]here are so many iconic single panels within that run,” Benson added. “But there’s one sequence in particular where our hero has been trying to escape from a mental health facility. He finally gets out. He jumps out, but it turns out he was on an airplane, and he’s free-falling. Obviously that doesn’t happen in this show, but we really feel like what we did captures the spirit of that distilled image into something that is not literally that but has the same feeling.”

But there is one scene in particular from the the comics that inspired the directing duo, and in this case they recreated it very closely. “[A]t the very end there’s this image that completely lit our hair on fire when we first read it,” Moorehead said. “It’s Marc Spector hugging himself, and he says, ‘Goodbye, Marc.’ It’s as he’s achieving integration and understanding who he is. Now, we’re not at the end of our story here, but we just felt like there’s this antagonism between [Steven and Marc], and they’re starting to learn to work together and gain some mutual respect. So when they first see each other in person, they would instinctually just embrace. That was something we were really leading towards with all the other episodes. We wanted to earn that moment.”

On Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke

The directors also did a fair amount of gushing about Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke, which isn’t too surprising considering the tour de force performance those two actors are giving. “A lot of what we do is chasing what Oscar is doing,” Moorehead said. “We feel like the show is at its absolute best whenever we’re marrying what we’re doing to honoring what Oscar’s doing. I think that’s pretty clear to anyone that watches Moon Knight.”

During the hospital sequence, there’s a long scene where Marc Spector is brought in to the doctor’s office…only to find that the doctor in question is Arthur Harrow. Except in this reality, Harrow has shorter hair, is sporting a mustache, and presumably has no glass in his shoes. Harrow tries to convince Marc that everything has been in his head while the disoriented hero looks around his office.

“I remember in the preparation of that scene, Ethan [Hawke] would talk about how he was feeling inspired by Carl Jung — by some of the most famous photographs of him and the pop culture interpretation of who he is, if nothing else,” Benson said. “We remember showing up to set and suddenly seeing Ethan in that mustache, with that hair, wearing the glasses, and I just thought what a wild transformation that was from Harrow.”

"The energy to his acting in that role was impressive — to the point of being exhausting to watch. [Laughs] Watching him do that scene over and over and over with such precision was a very special thing to get to witness."

If we had to choose one word to describe Ethan Hawke’s performance as Arthur Harrow, “precision” is a pretty good choice. With everything he and Isaac have done in the show, there’s the feeling that they are making meticulously thought-out choices for their characters. However, despite the fact that the scene in Harrow’s office was supposed to focus on Hawke, once the directors saw the two actors actually performing it, they reassessed.

“[Ethan Hawke] has 99 percent of the dialogue in that scene, and we shot his coverage first on that day,” Moorehead explained. “What’s funny is we assumed that because he is doing all the talking, that scene would just kind of be about him, with a few cutaways back to Marc. But once we turned it around on Oscar and saw what he was giving us and figuring out his eyelines, we realized how active it was. There’s this wonderful take where a fly lands on his hand on accident. That’s a real fly! He chased it.”

"It’s funny because we assumed we were going to be cutting the whole thing around Harrow, but we completely refocused the edit in our heads to be back in Marc’s experience in that moment — because Oscar was giving us so much."

I can completely believe that Isaac found ways to make just sitting there riveting.

Of course, there was a lot more than just that one scene to this ending sequence. Let’s talk about the hippo in the room.