2022 seems to be the year where the true deities of the MCU get introduced. While the early Thor films established the Norse gods as pseudo-space aliens, Moon Knight wastes no time in treating these beings like the divine pantheons they are. And in Episode 3 of Moon Knight, the Ennead, the cabal of Egyptian gods living among us through their avatars, was revealed in their full glory.
We spoke to production designer Stefania Cella about the process of bringing these characters to life and the lengths they had to go through to keep it as respectful as possible.
I went to Egypt to educate myself about Egyptian culture. We had an Egyptologist with us helping us translate hieroglyphs. It’s a long process of research.
Balancing the elevated fantasy from the comic books with the historical accuracy of Egyptology is not easy feat but Cella and Marvel Studios managed to bring it all together cohesively.
All the references to the literature on Egyptian worship, that was through proper research. We are very historically correct in the way we approach hieroglyphs and we try to be respectful because it was a religion. The way we made everything fantastic is based on the idea that there was this room inside the Pyramid where the gods meet. We married both fantastic and historic by being very proper on research but also taking creative liberties by imagining a fantastic chamber inside the Pyramid.
