NEW YORK — Ethan Hawke is over the moon to be part of a Marvel series unlike any other.
The four-time Oscar nominee says he enjoyed bringing a “mystical” and “transcendental vibe” to the superhero franchise with the new show “Moon Knight,” portraying a villainous cult leader who wants to purge the world of sinners.
“It’s not connected to the Avengers,” Hawke told the Daily News. “It’s not one that people know much about, so we had a long leash, and we had a lot of freedom to carve our own path and to create a new legend, a new myth.”
Hawke stars in the series, which debuted Wednesday on Disney+, opposite Oscar Isaac, whose Steven Grant is a simple souvenir shop salesman with dissociative identity disorder.
Steven’s life is flipped upside down when he realizes he’s sharing a body with a mercenary who serves the Egyptian moon god Khonshu and suit ups as a skilled warrior known as the Moon Knight.
His twist-filled journey brings him face to face with Hawke’s Arthur Harrow, a religious zealot who follows the Egyptian goddess Ammit.
“If the hero is genuinely struggling with mental illness, then what would be the most threatening thing to an unbalanced person? (It) would be a balanced person,” Hawke said. “Somebody who’s even. Somebody who’s constant. Somebody who’s penetrating. Somebody who’s unbroken. That was my starting place, trying to build this character.”
The Moon Knight character was originally introduced in the Marvel comic books in 1975. Hawke, a longtime New York resident who studied at NYU, says it was easy to get excited for “Moon Knight,” which marks his first role within the interweaving Marvel Cinematic Universe of movies and series.
“I bumped into Oscar at a coffee shop in Brooklyn during the pandemic,” Hawke recalled. “It was freezing. We all had masks on, and you couldn’t contain the electricity coming out of this guy about how excited he was to play this part. I just thought, all right, this will be an adventure worth taking.”
Hawke, 51, says Isaac’s preparation for the role included studying dissociative identity disorder “very seriously” and frequently speaking about his research with his co-stars.
“We’re both New Yorkers and we kind of come at acting in that old-school New York actor sensibility,” Hawke said of Isaac. “That’s the model in both of our brains. We both like to work. We both like to rehearse and talk and dream together, so the process of working with him was extremely comfortable to me.”
Hawke — whose past roles include “Training Day,” “Boyhood” and the “Before” trilogy — considers 2008′s “Iron Man” his favorite Marvel film due to star Robert Downey Jr.’s ability to give a “three-dimensional performance inside the spectacle of a superhero movie.”
He believes “Moon Knight” gave Isaac the chance to do the same thing with his troubled hero.
“(Isaac’s character) has a fractured reality and creates an unreliable narrator because he actually doesn’t understand what’s happening to him,” Hawke said. “As a filmmaker, as a storyteller, this is an exciting story to tell because you never know what’s real and not real, and what’s his imagination and what’s not.”
The series offered Hawke plenty of marvelous moments, too.
“The set was a work of art, with fountains and gold-painted walls and Egyptian iconography everywhere.” Hawke said. “It was so beautiful, and then Oscar Isaac walks in dressed as the Moon Knight, and you felt like you were in a walking dream.”
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