Jeremy Slater has written, developed, and executive produced “The Umbrella Academy” and “The Exorcist.” And he’s written a slew of big-budget screenplays, but he’s never tackled anything as challenging as the three-year journey he spent as the head writer of the Disney+ limited series “Moon Knight.”
At times the most original Marvel Studios television project to date, “Moon Knight,” follows Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a seemingly mild-mannered British museum employee who not only discovers he is the powerful avatar of an Egyptian god but that he’s one of two (or more) personalities inhabiting his body. In fact, once he meets his other identity, Marc Spector, everything he thinks he knows about his life may not be true at all.
It was almost a given that the series was going to need a very talented actor to play both Grant and Spector. The casting decision was out of Slater’s hands and made by Marvel executives. The writing team had faith that the studio wouldn’t stick them with someone terrible, but they were certainly concerned by the rumors of who was potentially in play.
Slater recalls, “I don’t want to throw any actors under the bus, but every now and then someone would toss out a name, and everyone around the room would kind of groan and be like, ‘Oh god, if it’s that guy, we’re dead in the water.’ Knowing that you needed an actor who can embody two different personalities and make that switch and make it so readily apparent to the audience that you understand, without any CGI trickery or without any sort of magic transition, you can just understand from the light in the guy’s eyes and the intonation in his voice and his body posture whether that’s Marc or Steven in control of that body. And that’s a tall order. There’s not a lot of actors out there who can pull that off.”
According to Slater, Isaac brought a thousand ideas to the table and was as responsible as anyone else for the creation of Marc and Steven.
“The idea of giving Steven a distinctive accent was something we had discussed in the room, and we had always been a little afraid to sort of commit to that because it was like, ‘Well, what if they don’t get a world-class actor? What if you have some handsome guy with a martial arts background, and you’re asking him to switch between a British accent and an American one?’ It seemed like a recipe for disaster,” Slater says. “So it was something we had discussed and then kind of said, “That’s too risky. That’s too dangerous.” And Oscar came on board and immediately said, ‘I think I’ve got this voice. Let me try it.’ And he did the voice for Kevin Feige. He did it for our producers and the directors. And I think everyone just sort of collectively knew like, ‘Oh, just get out of this guy’s way.'”
Over the course of our interview, Slater reveals whether he believes everything that happens in the series is “real” (a point of contention with viewers), if he believes Ethan Hawke’s character could return, where “Moon Knight”‘s gods stand among those seen in other MCU projects and much, much more.
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The Playlist: I know that you came on board in 2019, and then I saw in another interview that you basically were in a writers’ room sort of hashing out the series for like a year. What was the toughest nut to crack about this show?
Jeremy Slater: That’s a great question. Our writers’ room ran for 24 weeks, and then I was writing versions of that on my own for probably another year after that. And over that time, we probably went through six or seven different versions of the show that had sort of wildly different MacGuffins and villains and love interests and everything else. But for us, the trickiest aspect of the show and the thing that we were always sort of focusing on for each new iteration was really doing justice to the sort of mental health metaphor that’s sort of at the heart of the show, knowing that our show is about one man’s struggle with his own mind and his own mental health.
And while a lot of our viewers, most of our viewers are not going to be suffering from the same affliction, most of them aren’t going to have dissociative identity disorder, we knew that mental health was going to be a stand-in for a lot of other things. Everyone has their own struggles, whether that’s anxiety or depression, or anything else. And so it was really important to all of our writers and creative partners that whatever we’re putting out there in the world has to ultimately be positive. Knowing that you’re going to have millions and millions of eyeballs on something like this just because it carries the Marvel brand, we felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to get that aspect right and to make sure that, at the end of the day, we’re telling a story about mental health that’s empowering viewers rather than making them feel attacked or making them feel isolated or lonely. So that was kind of our North Star in terms of what we were aiming for, and all of our other sort of creative decisions came out of that.
And did you guys bring on a mental health advisor to consult on that aspect of the show?
Yeah. Disney was really great about hooking us up with multiple advisors. We had Dr. Paul Puri come in and speak to us about mental health and dissociative identity disorder. And he would also read scripts and offer feedback and say, “Oh, this part could be a little closer. This part’s not actually how it happens.” And Marvel [also] brought in a Jewish rabbi to consult on the Judaism [aspect]. We had an actual Egyptian archeologist who has been inside pyramid tombs before, and he came in and shared incredible stories about some of the things he experienced. So, they were really great about making sure that any resource or reference we needed was always just kind of one phone call away.
You’re spending a year working on this, was your biggest fear finding the right actor to pull off a character with multiple personalities?
We were constantly terrified. And you know that it’s ultimately a decision that’s going to be out of your hands. That is a decision that is made at the highest levels because this is a character who could potentially show up again in the Marvel universe in a multitude of different ways. So, we knew we weren’t necessarily going to have a say in that casting. We had faith and trust in Marvel that they wouldn’t stick us with someone terrible. But you still play that game with your writers where you say, “Well, what about this guy? And what about this actor and that actor?” And I don’t want to throw any actors under the bus, but every now and then someone would toss out a name, and everyone around the room would kind of groan and be like, “Oh god, if it’s that guy, we’re dead in the water.”
Knowing that you needed an actor who can embody two different personalities and make that switch and make it so readily apparent to the audience that you understand, without any CGI trickery or without any sort of magic transition, you can just understand from the light in the guy’s eyes and the intonation in his voice and his body posture whether that’s Marc or Steven in control of that body. And that’s a tall order. There are not a lot of actors out there who can pull that off. So when they told us it was Oscar Isaac, I think everyone just had such a collective sigh of relief, of like, “Oh, we couldn’t ask for a better actor. We’re in amazing hands right now.” And that’s when we knew we could push this even farther. We can have scenes, where this guy is switching back and forth between the different, alters in the same scene, in the same shot, because we had so much faith that whatever you throw at Oscar, he’s just going to knock it out of the park.
I’ve also read that Oscar had a lot of input into at least his character. Do you remember anything specific that was important to him?
Oscar brought a thousand ideas to the table. He was as responsible as anyone else for kind of the creation of Marc and Steven. The idea of giving Steven a distinctive accent was something we had discussed in the room, and we had always been a little afraid to sort of commit to that because it was like, “Well, what if they don’t get a world-class actor? What if you have some handsome guy with a martial arts background and you’re asking him to switch between a British accent and an American one?” It seemed like a recipe for disaster. So it was something we had discussed and then kind of said, “That’s too risky. That’s too dangerous.”
And Oscar came on board and immediately said, “I think I’ve got this voice. Let me try it.” And he did the voice for Kevin Feige. He did it for our producers and the directors. And I think everyone just sort of collectively knew like, “Oh, just get out of this guy’s way.” He has both of those characters, such a firm grasp on them, and has so much fun with both of them, and I think that fun is sort of infectious. The second we heard his Steven Grant voice, we knew this is the thing that is going to be possibly most unique about the show and the character.
There are some viewers who watch the show and are unclear whether some of it is in Marc’s mind. Is it imaginary? Is he projecting? What part is real? What isn’t?
Well, filmmaking is such a collaborative process that a bunch of people can work on the same project and have different interpretations of what actually is happening. For me, in my mind, it was always crystal clear that all of this is real. All of it matters, that it’s not a story of a mentally ill person and all this is playing out inside his head because for me, I want to see Moon Knight show up again in the MCU at some point in the future, whether that’s another show, whether that’s a movie, whether that’s teaming up with somebody. And I think once you see him interacting with the other characters in the MCU, then it becomes real. Then it’s like, “Well, of course, this is all real, because, look, this guy’s now hanging out with Captain America or whoever else.”
But I know the way it was shot and the way it was edited, it’s certainly dropping some breadcrumbs that are fun for viewers to pick apart and to sort of digest and argue about what’s going on. I like the aspect that everything’s not necessarily cut and dry, even if in my mind it all matters, it’s all real. My least favorite storytelling trope is the sort of “it was all a dream” reveal at the end of the story. So I never like to do that to audiences, and I would never want to write that story because I think it means that the journey you just went on didn’t have any stakes and didn’t matter. And I want this show to have stakes. I want it to matter and for people to feel like this was worth six hours of their life. This was worth the time investment they put in.
One thing that many viewers picked up on was when Marc is led by Arthur, played by Ethan Hawke, through that area where his cult lives. You can pick up that all these things that he’s showing him and how he’s talking to him are also what would happen in a psychiatric facility. Was that stuff that was in the script? Was that purposeful?
Oh, I think all of that stuff was intentional because I think you want the audience, especially in those early episodes, to be asking the same questions that the main character is, which is, “What is happening to me? Is any of this real? Am I losing my mind? Am I hallucinating?” So all of that stuff was incredibly intentional to try to disorient viewers as much as possible. But I think by the time we get to the end of the story, we realize the stakes of the journey that he went on actually mattered and actually happened in the MCU.
But some of those conversations that he has with Arthur Harrow, where Harrow is like the head of the psychiatric institute or he’s posing as a doctor, I think questions like that of like, “Well, was that real? Was that inside Marc’s mind? Was that another manifestation of one of his alters or one of his personalities?” I think those are questions that don’t have a definitive answer yet and possibly never will. Some of those storytelling decisions are above my pay grade because whoever picks up the reins on the character and tells the next story, I think, is going to get to kind of definitively answer some of those outstanding questions.
Knowing that in your mind that a majority of what took place is real, there’s that extra scene at the end of the finale where Marc’s third personality Jake, pops in, and he, in theory, kills Arthur. Is Arthur dead in your view?
That’s the way I wrote it on the page. Again, because you don’t actually see a body, no one’s ever dead until you see the body. We had that teaser pretty early on in our story. I didn’t want to introduce Jake until the very end because I knew that it was going to be hard enough to make the audience care about the relationship between Marc and Steven if it was just the two of them. And I knew that if you put three personalities in there, it would just become a mess and that it would be too hard for the audience to track.
So the goal from the very beginning was we’re going to save Jake for the teaser. He’s going to be the one who kills Harrow. But the fact that we don’t see a body, and I think the fact that everyone loved Ethan Hawke so much and had so much fun working with him on this project, I think they’re just kind of keeping a few cards in their deck just in case the circumstances are ever right. It could have been a flesh wound. It could have been a warning shot. I don’t know. In my mind, he’s dead. But again, the person who gets to answer that is whoever kind of tells the next Moon Knight story.
How did you and the writer’s room tackle working in Khanshu and the Egyptian gods into the larger sphere of Marvel gods? “Thor: Love and Thunder” is coming out, which clearly is about a god killer and has Zeus in it with other Greek or Roman gods. Plus, since the first “Thor” movie, many of these gods have been assumed to be alien beings. It’s a little nebulous now. How was the process of introducing these “gods” into the MCU?
Marvel was great about giving us our own little corner and our own little space and saying, “O.K., the Egyptian gods can be their own thing,” especially since we’re only seeing, I think, three of them on screen over the course of this story. But we did speak extensively with the producers of “Thor: Love and Thunder” just to find out what they were doing with gods in their story, to make sure that we weren’t going to be contradicting anything. At the time, all of the release dates were still up in the air, and we didn’t know if we would be coming out before “Thor: Love And Thunder” or following up ‘Love And Thunder.’
So we had to make the decision early on, just to be safe, let’s give ourselves some space and let’s not reference the events of [the new movie] because we had different versions that could have served as either a lead into “Thor” or sort of dealing with the aftermath of what happens in that movie. And everyone just sort of decided, “You know what? These release dates are going to be determined by much larger factors than whatever’s happening in our show. So the safest thing to protect both of these properties is just to give them some distance.” Marvel is constantly expanding the boundaries of the MCU, and it’s getting bigger, and it’s weirder, and it’s giving us a lot more runway to tell cool stories in the future. So. I could definitely see some of these gods crossing over into other properties or showing up in other forms in future shows.
That makes sense. When you finally saw the dailies or scenes cut together, was there one moment in particular that you were super excited about compared to how you had envisioned it on the page?
I was really pleased with the ending of the first episode, with that first sort of jackal fight and the first reveal of Moon Knight, just because that had been something we had decided on very early in the process. I think it had even been part of my very first pitch to Kevin Feige. The moment where the guy is locked in the bathroom and he’s about to get killed, and his mirror reflection starts speaking to him, that had been part of my pitch from the very beginning.
And that was one of the first things I saw animatics for. It was one of the first things I saw come together. And everything is hypothetical for a three-year period while you’re making a show like this. It takes so damn long for this stuff to actually come to life. So to see it and to see that they nailed it and that it was even cooler than it had been in my imagination, that was the moment where I kind of got goosebumps, and I was like, “Oh, God, this is going to be awesome. This is going to be so much fun. I can’t wait for people to see this.”
Last but not least, do you have any insight at all on whether a second series might happen? Or was this just a one-shot thing?
I honestly have no idea. I haven’t had any conversations with Marvel. I think a lot of those decisions are ultimately going to be in the hands of Kevin Feige because he’s the guy with the master plan. And of course, Oscar Isaac, because he’s not signed up for the sort of traditional seven-film contract or whatever other actors have signed. Oscar has the ability to do as much or as little “Moon Knight” as he wants to. I think he had a great time playing the character, and I think he really enjoyed the process and is happy he did it. But I also think he’s not a guy who’s going to rush in and just sort of churn out a sequel just because the first one was popular.
Again, I don’t want to speak for him and put words in his mouth, but my guess is he’s going to want to make sure that there’s an actual story worth telling and that he gets to go to places that he didn’t get to go in this first one and challenge himself in new ways. My hope and dream is that we see him again in some form in the MCU, but I have no idea when that will be or what form it will take. I’m in the dark like everyone else.
“Moon Knight” is available on Disney+.