Moon Knight directors break down that twist ending
By Daniel Roman
On making “Tomb Buster”
One particularly intriguing morsel in the hospital is the campy Indiana Jones knock-off movie that opens the sequence. Titled Tomb Buster, this movie follows a scenery-chewing adventurer as he hacks his way through a jungle. His name, of course, is Dr. Steven Grant.
As you can imagine, the filming of Tomb Buster was pretty silly. “Production on that was really interesting because you’re working on a Marvel show with literally the greatest filmmaking technicians in the world, and now you’re asking everyone to intentionally make something that looks like it was made with toothpicks and papier-mache,” Moorehead said. “That was a very interesting experience. Everyone had a lot of good laughs that morning. Everybody was just having an absolute blast, being as cheesy as we possibly could.”
"We realized that we didn’t know if we would see the TV again [later in the episode]. So we actually asked the writers to write an extra minute of the scene so that it could play in the background as needed. We actually got to shoot twice as much of that. Now we want to make a whole series of it. It has some of the most ridiculous dialogue that they could come up with."
“It was essentially someone sharing way too much information about their parental relationships for way too long,” added Benson. “I remember the Dr. Steven Grant character said, ‘Sometimes I wish I had chosen my birth mother instead of nature to raise me,’ or some goofy thing like that,” said Moorehead.
Any takers for a full-length Tomb Buster movie?
On introducing Taweret, the hippo-headed Egyptian goddess
Of course, despite all these other cool easter eggs, the biggest thing that everyone is talking about is the deity Marc and Steven meet in the episode’s final shot. Sporting the head of a hippopotamus, Taweret is the Egyptian goddess of fertility, childbirth, and rejuvenation. She’s played by Antonia Salib, though of course it’s impossible to see the actor beneath all that CGI.
“It’s funny. We only had one or maybe two shots with this [hippo] character,” Benson said. “She showed up to set, of course dressed in a goofy greenscreen outfit, and we just tried about two dozen different takes on that scene. We just kind of stood off to the side, and she immediately trusted us and took the direction in stride. Even though we had met only just minutes before, and she just screamed for us every which way.”
"It was really interesting from a technical standpoint. The way we shot that is there are three performers screaming in that scene, but there were never two people together. We had someone pretending to be a hippo, screaming by themselves. Then we had Oscar Isaac as Marc, screaming by himself. Then we had Oscar Isaac as Steven, screaming by himself. None of those people were together. It’s like an opera of screaming."
It’s kind of hilarious to imagine all the different high-pitched shrieking that occurred on the Moon Knight set that day. We can only wonder what the neighbors thought.
Moon Knight has two more episodes left in its run. Whatever lies ahead for Marc and Steven, it’s sure to be pretty weird. “I think if you were surprised by episode 4, get ready to be surprised again by episodes 5 and 6,” Moorehead teased. “I know it just sounds like a nice little tag, but I promise you that’s actually the case.”
The first four episodes of Moon Knight are available now on Disney+, with new episodes dropping on Wednesdays. We review each one as they go live. Here’s our latest:
Next. Review: Moon Knight stumbles hard in “The Tomb”. dark
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