Haven’t heard of Mork Sphincter before? That’s not surprising, but if you’ve seen Moon Knight you’ve definitely seen him on screen.
Mork Sphincter is the nickname that Michael Benjamin Hernandez—Oscar Isaac’s brother/body double on Moon Knight—earned on set.
Hernandez took his body doubling role seriously, from working out and dieting with his brother to get MCU-level fit, to going through the same hair and makeup to look as similar to Isaac’s Steven/Marc as possible.
“If Oscar was playing Marc at the time, I would play Steven opposite of him. Then we would switch around, and he would play the Steven role and I would do the Marc role,” Hernandez told Marvel.com (via Slashfilm). “It would involve me being on set with him doing the scenes, or an earpiece, where I would give him the lines. So depending on how they were shooting it, I would either be actually there in the scene or off-camera.”
The body double work also required Hernandez to wear some prosthetics to look more like his brother. “It was just this weird, mutated abomination of Marc with a fake prosthetic nose,” he explained. “I had never done the whole casting thing where they pour the green goo over your face…and I was totally game for all of that. I was totally game for like, yeah, you want to give me a wig or fake nose? We even thought of fake chin parts and cheeks. But then we established that if we were going to film from behind my shoulder, the nose was the prominent piece to get. And so that made it feel like it was actually Oscar there, because he has a beautiful schnoz, and we wanted to recreate that.”
While the prosthetics weirded Hernandez out a bit, he said he eventually forgot all about it. “You could see that it worked well,” he said. “Mork Sphincter will always be a part of me.”
You can see Marc Spector, Steven Grant, and Mork Sphincter when new episodes of Moon Knight drop on Disney+ on Wednesdays.
