To play his double troublemaker in Moon Knight, currently on Disney +, Oscar Isaac used a first-rate understudy… his brother!
If you’ve started watching Moon Knight, you already know that Oscar Isaac plays Steven Grant, a gift shop employee who realizes he’s sharing his body with another person. In other words, this character has the particularity of being affected by a dissociative identity disorder. The actor opened up about the challenges of portraying the disorder on the show during a press conference, the site reports. Insider.
In the series, this dissociative identity disorder, or DID, is brought to life by showing Steven communicating with his alter ego, Marc Spector, through mirrors. Oscar Isaac explained that he asked his brother Michael Benjamin Hernandez, actor and journalist, to play opposite him during these scenes.
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It’s the closest thing to me on Earth, said Isaac. He would arrive and he would play Steven or Marc. He even did the accent. So it was really helpful to have someone to play with who is not only a great actor but also shares my DNA.
About accent, in the series, Steven has a strong British pronunciation – he lives and works in London – although the character is originally American. It’s an idea that comes from Oscar Isaac himself. But the actor hadn’t anticipated that this role would be so “technically demanding“.
“I would arrive and decide which character I was going to play first. Then I would try to freeze that and I would give notes to my brother, we would do the scene, and then we would swap our characters.“, he explained. The result is in any case stunning, these face-to-face scenes being particularly successful!