Moon Knight star Ethan Hawke, who plays the villain Arthur Harrow in the Disney Plus series, is declaring Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk, AKA Kingpin, as his favorite Marvel performance.
The praise comes from a Q&A on Instagram in which a fan asks, “Do you have a favorite Marvel character?”
“Well it would be very easy to say Robert Downey [Jr.] as Iron Man because it’s still the high watermark for me,” Hawke begins. “But in truth, I think I have to do a shout out to Vincent D’Onofrio as Fisk.
“That’s a great character portrait, that’s a great performance, and when I took this job, I was aiming at him,” the actor concludes, with a pantomime of slinging an arrow.
D’Onofrio first unleashed onto the world his wrathful portrait of Fisk in the first season of Daredevil in 2015, which originally premiered on Netflix. Since then Fisk, along with all the other Defenders-verse characters, migrated over to Disney Plus. The supervillain with a penchant for wearing white suits even made a triumphant return as a surprise antagonist in last year’s Disney Plus Marvel series Hawkeye.
In real life, D’Onofrio and Hawke are pals, so it’s no wonder Hawke looked to D’Onofrio for inspiration when it was his turn to embody a villain character opposite Oscar Isaac’s Marc Spector, AKA Moon Knight.
Last month, Moon Knight devotee D’Onofrio even praised Hawke’s performance in the show, as well as co-stars Isaac and May Calamawy.
You can catch Hawke chewing the scenery in his broken-glass-filled loafers, in Wednesday’s season finale of Moon Knight.