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TL;DR:

  • Ethan Hawke’s opening scene as Arthur Harrow in Moon Knight shows him putting broken glass in his shoes.
  • Ethan Hawke revealed how he came up with the scene and what he actually had stuffed in his shoes.
  • The actor also shared some of his inspirations for the mysterious Arthur Harrow.
Ethan Hawke as Arthur Harrow in Moon Knight
Ethan Hawke as Arthur Harrow in ‘Moon Knight.’ | Marvel Studios/Disney+

Last week, hundreds of Moon Knight fans likely cringed as Ethan Hawke’s Arthur Harrow shattered glass, stuffed it in his shoes, and put them on within the first minutes of episode 1. The scene was certainly disturbing, but it was quite a memorable way to introduce Moon Knight’s antagonist. Looking back at the opener, Hawke revealed how he came up with the glass shoes idea. Here’s more on Hawke’s character and the making of that first scene.

Ethan Hawke plays Dr. Arthur Harrow in ‘Moon Knight’

Moon Knight follows the story of Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a museum worker who experiences blackouts and missing memories. He eventually realizes that he has dissociative identity disorder (DID) and shares a body with a mercenary named Marc Spector/Moon Knight. Steven finds himself entangled in a mystery involving Egyptian gods, and at the center of it all is Arthur Harrow.

Arthur is a cult leader who uses the power of the Egyptian goddess Ammit to judge the morality of his followers. If someone is deemed immoral, he kills them.

Speaking to Screen Rant, Hawke shared that Moon Knight’s focus on mental illness got him interested in playing Arthur. He heard Isaac’s pitch for the series and knew he wanted to be part of it.

“Mental illness is often used to create villains, but not often to create heroes. When he started talking about that, I got really interested,” Hawke said.

How Ethan Hawke’s ‘Moon Knight’ opening scene with broken glass came to be

In a recent interview with Variety, Ethan Hawke explained what led to the broken glass scene in Moon Knight Episode 1. He revealed that he came up with the idea while thinking about comic book villains.

“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,” he said. “I kept asking the writers and directors, if it was a comic book, what would his full-page drawing be?”

Hawke said he also thought about “spiritual people who go crazy” and start “self-lacerating.” He continued:

“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. … I knew he had a cane and I kept saying, ‘Wait, I have a cane. Do I have a limp?’ They’re like, ‘No, you don’t have a limp.’ And I thought, ‘Ahh, I know why he has a cane.’ So I told them this idea.”

Don’t worry, though; Hawke didn’t go full method acting on the broken glass scene.

“It’s just candy glass — it turns to sand pretty quick, so my feet are OK,” he said. “I didn’t go full Daniel Day-Lewis and cut the bottom of my feet.”

Ethan Hawke shared his inspiration for his character

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Hawke also spoke about Arthur Harrow as a whole and what inspirations he brought into the character. He revealed that he researched Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The Before Sunrise star said he drew a connection between DID’s “dream language” and the way Jung often wrote about dreams.

“I didn’t know much about Carl Jung, so I started reading all about him, and I started finding a lot of his most famous quotes really spoke to the language of this piece, and I started riffing on this combination of half-monk, half-doctor. That was where my brain took me,” Hawke added.

New episodes of Moon Knight drop every Wednesday on Disney+.

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