Warning: This article contains spoilers for season one, episode four of Moon Knight.
If you were like other viewers of this week’s episode of the Marvel series Moon Knight, you may have been caught completely off-guard by the crazy twist ending. You’re in good company, because so was series star Lucy Thackeray, who recently told The Direct that she traveled all the way to Hungary and back without knowing about the big reveal.
In a twist taken directly from Jeff Lemire and Greg Smallwood’s run on the comic that inspired the series, Marc Spector, who up until this point has been a globetrotting superhero with a fractured psyche, gets shot and “killed.” At which point he wakes up as a patient in a mental hospital, finding that the characters he’s met thus far are in “reality” orderlies and fellow patients.
One of those is his erstwhile boss at the museum, Thackeray’s Donna. In an exclusive interview with The Direct, Thackeray explained that nobody ever told her she’d be in the asylum or anything else about her character beyond the scenes she was immediately filming at the time:
“No, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything, really. I had my scenes that I did for my audition. And that was it. And in fact, that was only, I think, two little scenes I had. And then there was this talk of the asylum. And I was like, ‘ Oh? Excuse me? What are you talking about? This sounds crazy.’ But then people were talking to me like I knew I was going to be in the asylum, and I just [had] no idea what anyone was talking about. So at the end of [my first trip to Budapest], they said that [I] was going to come back to the asylum. I was like, ‘Okay. Great! I’m available.’”
When asked if she played the character differently once she was in the hospital, Thackeray said that once she understood where her character was supposed to be at the end of episode four, she simply took Donna’s existing characteristics and amplified them:
“So I just asked, ‘I’m doing my London voice, right? You don’t need me to be Australian or Irish?’ They said, ‘Yeah, you’re the same Donna, you just exist in a sort of different… [possible] parallel world.’ A Donna that has needs to be in a psychiatric facility. So I kinda took anger issues or impatient issues and turned it all up 100%.”
Moon Knight drops Wednesdays at 12am ET on Disney Plus.
