Ethan Hawke has revealed that his Moon Knight character's opening scene was his idea.
Hawke plays the antagonist of the Marvel series, cult leader Arthur Harrow. The very first scene in episode 1 introduces us to him, and we see Harrow break a glass with his cane before putting the shards inside his sandals.
"That [scene] really sprang out of my imagination and our conversations," Hawke told Variety. "When you read a comic book, some of the pages have eight drawings, some of them have 16, some have four, and then every now and then, they'll give like the villain one full-page drawing. I kept asking the writers and directors, if it was a comic book, what would his full-page drawing be? And they were like, 'What do you think it was?'
"I started really meditating on that, and I started thinking about spiritual people who go crazy, who get mad on their own spiritual pride, and how often that turns inward and you see that they're secretly self-lacerating in some way and hating themselves. Because we all have sin, and the idea that somebody is free of sin is not really possible if you're human. And so with the self-hatred and the turning inward, I had this image of him listening to a hymn while he put broken glass in his shoes, that he hid from other people."
However, Hawke confirmed that he didn't opt for a method approach to this scene: "It's just candy glass – it turns to sand pretty quick, so my feet are okay," he added. "I didn't go full Daniel Day-Lewis and cut the bottom of my feet."
Moon Knight is currently streaming on Disney Plus, with new episodes airing weekly. If you're not already, then subscribe to Disney Plus here. For more on Moon Knight, check out our interviews with series stars Oscar Isaac and May Calamawy.
