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Everyone will agree that Ethan Hawke made for an excellent Marvel Cinematic Universe villain in Moon Knight, with the actor’s quietly deranged Arthur Harrow acting as the malevolent counterpoint to Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant and Marc Spector, even if it fulfilled the typical “good guy and bad guy are two sides of the same coin” remit we’ve regularly seen from the franchise over the years.
It was Isaac who convinced his opposite number to get on board when Moon Knight was in its early stages, and it’d be an understatement to say that it worked out spectacularly for all involved by the time Wednesday’s finale drew to a close. That being said, producer Jeremy Slater revealed to The Direct that three other antagonists were once in line to steal Harrow’s spot.
“I mean Bushman was in my first couple versions of the script for sure, and we tried to have several different versions of him. Ultimately, I was the one to make the decision to ax Bushman. I went to Marvel and said I’m not comfortable with this, can we take him out and talk about different versions, and they were always really supportive.”
Bushman was referenced as an Easter Egg as a former commanding officer of Spector’s, so the longtime enemy of Moon Knight is technically MCU canon. However, Slater went on to reveal that a pair of much lesser-known foes were also in the mix.
“And we really looked at all of the sort of classic villains. There was a couple that we talked about; Stained Glass Scarlet, and you know, Zodiac, and different characters like that. No one really kind of fit the parameters of the story we were telling, so we were just like, ‘You know what, can we just introduce a guy, and we’ll grab a name from some’—you know, they gave me a list of every villain whose ever appeared in a Moon Knight comic. I just went through and went like, ‘Arthur Harrow, that sounds like a cool villain name, let’s go with that.’”
Sounds as though it was nomenclature that won out in the end, even if it’s hard to image Hawke bringing similar levels of quiet malevolence to any of the other names listed above.