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.
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:
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