Two of the directors from Moon Knight have explained how they had to take pains to avoid shooting with Oscar Isaac in the same locations where he shot Dune and Star WarsMoon Knight follows Isaac as Steven Grant, a mild-mannered British employee of a museum gift shop who learns that he has dissociative identity disorder. Not only that, but one of his primary alternate identities, the hardnosed American mercenary Marc Spector, is channeling the powers of the Egyptian moon god Khonshu to become the caped crusader known as Moon Knight. Moon Knight episode 1 set up the basics of this premise, but there are still many mysteries left for him to uncover.

A future episode of Moon Knight is going to take Isaac's character deep into the desert, presumably on a mission to discover more about the source of his powers. The team shot this episode in Wadi Rum, a large sandstone valley in Jordan. The valley is a very popular filming location, having appeared in huge projects like Lawrence of ArabiaTransformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Prometheus, also playing Mars in no fewer than four projects including Ridley Scott's The Martian. It is a location that Isaac knows well, having shot scenes from both Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (where it played the planet Pasaana) and Dune (where it played Arrakis) there previously.

Related: Moon Knight Proves How Weak Almost Every MCU Villain Is

While speaking with THR about working on the big-budget series, directing duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead were asked about how they had to approach shooting with Isaac in Wadi Rum. Benson revealed that as an "Oscar Isaac superfan," it was certainly "distracting" even though "there was very little that was off-limits to us in that way." However, Moorhead shared that during their scout there was a moment where they said "Wait, no, that’s from Star Wars. Don’t do that." Read the full quote below:

Moorhead: (Laughs.) When we were scouting, there was a location where they said, “Wait, no, that’s from Star Wars. Don’t do that.” Right? Am I crazy?

Benson: Yeah … I mean, when you’re location scouting there, so many of those locations are attached to beloved films that you’ve seen. There was very little that was off-limits to us in that way, but I will say that as an Oscar Isaac superfan who’s gone to see all his movies in a movie theater, do I recognize some of those locations? Absolutely! Is it distracting? Yes!

Moorhead & Benson: (Laugh.)

Moorhead: I was watching The Martian the other day, and when I saw that special rock that they shot with [in Wadi Rum], it was like the Leonardo DiCaprio meme [from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood]. I was like, “There it is!”

Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron in Rise of Skywalker

The producers of Moon Knight have kept a tight lid on spoilers for the series, so it is unknown how frequently Wadi Rum was used as a location. The globetrotting show has already featured sequences set in London and an alpine village in Germany, so there's no telling how long they'll settle into a single setting. However, Benson and Moorhead were only the directors for two episodes of the six-episode series, so whether or not Wadi Rum appears in multiple episodes, it is certain to pop up in either episode 2 or 4, which are the ones they helmed.

Although Isaac has been to this location several times, Moon Knight will actually be the first instance for him where Wadi Rum is actually playing an earthbound location. It is most likely playing Egypt rather than Jordan, but that's a lot closer to reality than any time he's visited the location before. It will be interesting to see if that changed the dynamic of his performance when he revisited it yet again.

Next: How Powerful Moon Knight Is Compared To The Avengers

Source: THR

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