Moon Knight fans waited the Marvel show’s entire first season for Jake Lockley, Marc Spector’s third main persona, to appear. So naturally everyone went nuts when he ultimately cameod in the finale’s post-credits scene. As with both Marc and Steven Grant, Jake has been reimagined somewhat for the screen, with him being portrayed as Marc’s deadliest form and a brutal and loyal agent of Khonshu.
Amid all the excitement for his MCU debut, then, there’s also been some blowback against his depiction. Some have argued that Jake’s presentation as Marc’s evil side plays into the widespread and harmful trope of connecting Dissociative Identity Disorder with villainy. e.g. James McAvoy’s controversial character in the movie Split.
In an interview with TheDirect.com, however, showrunner Jeremy Slater defended his portrayal against this line of criticism. Slater admitted that “whoever takes over the reins of the story gets to decide” how Jake is characterized but, for him, he believes that Jake isn’t evil and we just need to dive into his reasons and motivations for doing Khonshu’s bidding. He explained:
“[T]he interesting question about Jake is, what is his relationship with Khonshu? Why is he so willing to do these horrible things in service of Khonshu. Why is he the one guy who sort of believes in Khonshu’s mission? What does he know that our heroes don’t? I think there’s a lot of questions like that that haven’t necessarily been answered.”
Slater went on to stress that, with Moon Knight season two not having been greenlit at this point, it isn’t up to him to decide, but he believes that fans shouldn’t think of Jake as plain evil and he hopes there will be some extra shades and texture added to him whenever we next see him. Slater continued:
“I think that making Jake a generic evil guy would probably be the least exciting, or least interesting, direction to take that character in the future. So, I have no idea where Jake goes from here, and which writers and directors will bring him to life, but, I think there’s a lot of potentials. I think we’ve only teased the existence of this character at this point. We kind of still don’t know anything about him… I don’t think he’s evil. It’s Marvel’s decision, not mine, but I think calling him evil would be a mistake at this stage in the game.”
Producer Grant Curtis has previously explained that it wasn’t a “conscious decision” to save Jake until the very end of the season and that the holdover came from the need to focus on Marc and Steven’s arcs and to explore their relationship. Oscar Isaac certainly seemed to relish getting the chance to play a third character, though, as he’s revealed that he improvised Jake’s trait of speaking Spanish.
Stream all six episodes of Moon Knight on Disney Plus.
Published: May 12, 2022 11:02 am