Meant to be! Oscar Isaac made his Saturday Night Live debut and couldn’t resist teasing excited Marvel fans about his forthcoming role in Disney+’s Moon Knight — which he may have manifested years earlier.
“I am excited about joining the Marvel universe with Moon Knight,” the Dune star, 42, gushed during his monologue during the Saturday, March 5, episode of the sketch series. “It’s kind of a full-circle moment since the first movie I was ever in was called The Avenger. Not The Avengers, which was a massive blockbuster.”
He continued: “No, no, this was The Avenger, which is a movie I wrote, directed and starred in when I was 10 years old. It was shot on location in my buddy Bruce Ferguson’s backyard, in our hometown of Miami, Florida.”
Isaac — who shared home footage of the throwback production — joked that it is “arguably better” than MCU’s The Avengers, which he made with “half the budget.”
“But I took it really seriously—maybe a little too seriously. … I actually had to sign a licensing agreement to show it. It’s true,” the actor — whose real name is Oscar Isaac Hernández Estrada — said during Saturday’s episode. “It’s important to encourage kids to be weirdos because, every once in a while, one of those weirdos grows up to host SNL.”
While Isaac excitedly made his SNL debut on Saturday, he’s been gearing up to play former Marine Marc Spector in Marvel’s Moon Knight series for Disney+. Spector, who suffered from dissociative identity disorder, eventually becomes a conduit for an Egyptian moon god — and a superhero with the Moon Knight moniker.
“I found so much room to do things that I’ve never done before and had been curious about and wanting to do,” the Scenes From a Marriage actor told Variety of his MCU role in October 2021. “I could not wait to get to set and it was the biggest workload I’ve ever had in my career and most challenging by the sheer amount of stuff we had to do in eight months, and even yet, I couldn’t wait to get to set and work.”
While Isaac served as the star of the new limited series, he was eager to contribute to the creative process in other ways, too.
“Speaking with Kevin [Feige, Marvel’s president], I told him, ‘I’m going to come in with these big ideas, and if you don’t like them, that’s fair.’ And immediately, we saw it all,” he noted to Variety at the time.
Saturday Night Live airs on NBC Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET.
Moon Knight premieres on Disney+ Wednesday, March 30.
For more, watch the clip above!
