In an exclusive interview with comicbook.com, head writer of the MCU/Disney Plus series Moon Knight Jeremy Slater shared his thoughts and feelings about the series, and all of the characters from the comic book run that didn’t make the cut in the show.
One of those was the mercenary-turned Moon Knight arch-enemy Raul Bushman, who was part of a guerilla army that killed Marc Spector’s brother and who tried to destroy the statue of Egyptian god Khoshu from which he believed MK derived his power.
While Bushman was mentioned in passing, he was never seen onscreen, and Slater wasn’t shy about sharing his belief that Bushman is out there somewhere. As he told comicbook.com:
“I don’t know if he still has his face. That’s a good question… He’s definitely still out there. And I think at some point in Moon Knight’s journey, you’re going to have to involve Bushman.”
He went on to explain that the character didn’t fit in with his vision of how the show’s arc should unfold:
“I tried very hard to get him in there in a couple different versions of Bushman. And there were just a lot of reasons why he wasn’t great as an antagonist for this first story,” Slater adds. “The main one was just that we had to start from Steven’s perspective. That was something I really believed in right from the beginning is that you’re never going to make people fall in love with Marc, unless they fall in love with Steven first. And we realize Marc is Steven’s protector. But by doing it in that order and starting from Steven’s perspective, it made it very hard to have Bushman show up because Bushman is just a guy with a gun. And that immediately makes him way too lethal for Steven. Bullet in the head, Steven’s gone.”
He never cleared up the mystery of whether Raul Bushman is related to old-time actor Francis X. Bushman or the comedian “Bushman” who beat Norm MacDonald on Star Search in the late 1980s.
