She-Hulk Head Writer Talks Cut MCU Digs, Introducing [Spoiler], Repealing The Sokovia Accords And More
The following contains spoilers from the entire season of Disney+'s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, which streamed its finale on Oct. 13.
It sounds like Jen Walters (played by Tatiana Maslany) had a lot more to get off her chest when candidly venting to K.E.V.I.N. in the She-Hulk: Attorney at Law season finale.
In the season finale of Disney+'s latest live-action Marvel series, Jen put a stop to the "messy" showdown that was starting to unspool, climbed around the Disney+ app to get herself to the Disney lot and confront the show's writers about rehashing tired MCU tropes. Jen as She-Hulk then muscled her way into a face-to-face with K.E.V.I.N, the giant A.I. brain that oversees the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There, she called Marvel on the carpet on multiple issues — though it sounds like some wound up on the cutting room floor, as revealed in our full Q&A below with She-Hulk head writer and executive producer Jessica Gao.
Gao also spoke about casting Hulk's son, bringing back Charlie Cox's Daredevil, changing up the order of episodes and more. (Portions of this conversation previously appeared on TVLine over the weekend.)
TVLINE | What was Jessica Gao's favorite part of the She-Hulk season finale? Aside from playing "Writer No. 4" in the writers room scene?
Oh, that was my absolute least favorite part. I was dragged kicking and screaming into that cameo. [Laughs] My two favorite parts were, one, that 1970s cold opening homage to the original The Incredible Hulk. I can't believe we got to do it, and it was so wonderfully done. Our second unit director, Mo Ganderton, directed most of that, I believe, if not all of it, and it just looks so great. The editors did such a good job of making it feel exactly right. And my other favorite part of course is meeting K.E.V.I.N.
TVLINE | In the K.E.V.I.N. scene, did you ever think to call out Marvel for more than its over-reliance on flashy final boss fights and so many heroes' daddy issues?
Oh, there were tons more. Tons and tons more. Some of it was cut for time, some of it was cut because it was probably too mean.... [Laughs] There was a lot of material for that scene that I had to cut down. I mean, I could have written that scene for days and days and days. In the end, it was reflective of my actual conversations with [Marvel Studios chief] Kevin [Feige].
TVLINE | What, were there costuming digs or...?
[Hearty laugh]
TVLINE | Ooh, I think I hit on one!
[Still laughing] Then I'll just leave it at me cackling.
TVLINE | Introducing Hulk's son Skaar to the MCU was no small deal. Did you always know that you'd get to play that beat of Bruce's story within the show?
No, not at all. We started out just thinking, like, "What would be a fun tag?" What would be a fun, typical, Marvel-like tag, where at the very end of something you drop in a new character, drop in a cameo...? A cameo obviously would be dependent on who was available to do it. But then we also were told that, depending on who, we could also pitch introducing a new character. Ultimately, it was Kevin [Feige] who decided that he wanted to introduce Skaar.
TVLINE | In doing so, did you basically cast Skaar for the remainder of the MCU, or is that actor (DC's Stargirl's Wil Deusner) possibly a placeholder?
I'm honestly not sure what their plans are, so you'll have to ask Kevin, or K.E.V.I.N., himself.
TVLINE | At the time you started writing the scenes with Matt Murdock and Daredevil, had someone told you on the down low, "We're bringing him back in is own series, and this is the foundation we'd like you to lay down"?
No, all we were told is that it was on the table, that would could use Daredevil and it would be Charlie Cox again. We were shocked and we were elated, and we really weren't given any sort of limitations on using him; all we were told is he was the only one we could use. We weren't trying to bring on anybody else; this was one character we were offered, and we decided we were going to take it and do something with it. The way Marvel has always done things — with us, at least — is they let us pitch what we want to do, and then it's a "yes" or a "no," rather than limit us from the beginning. It's, "Well, tell us what you want to do, and then we'll tell you whether or not you can."
TVLINE | And Daredevil's costume change was precipitated by... what?
Those were decisions that were above my pay grade.
TVLINE | It's a pretty big thing to repeal the Sokovia Accords (first introduced in 2016's Captain America: Civil War) with a passing line of dialogue from Matt Murdock. Was that something that came from on high?
That conversation came from on high. I think we might have asked about it and were told that we could say that it had been repealed, so I was very happy to do that.
TVLINE | If you had know at the time that Madisynn (played in Episode 4 by Patty Guggenheim) was going to blow up the way she did, would you have squeezed her into the finale, to give us one final encore?
She was definitely a favorite character, but we wrote the whole season before casting it. We all were delighted with this character but never in writing her did we think that she would go that big. It wasn't until Patty Guggenheim was cast and we saw her work that we were like, "Ohhh, this is going to be the breakout character. It's now the Madisynn Supremacy." But by then we were already midway through shooting. But if i had known it was Patty Guggenheim from the beginning, she absolutely would have been in not just the finale, but more episodes.
TVLINE | Well, in the finale's mid-credits scene, I would have been happy just to hear her in the distance calling out for her "Wongers!" while he's grabbing Emil.
[Laughs] Or you just see her kind of walking by the background holding a vodka-and-yak milk.
TVLINE | You spoke earlier this season about how She-Hulk's origin story was originally was going to come in Episode 8, instead of in the premiere. What was the plan to segue into that later in the season?
Well, when it was written, it was actually written to be the fourth episode. The plan was that in the first three episodes we would meet Jen Walters, she would already be She-Hulk, and you'd get to know what her life was like and who the people in her life were. And then three episodes in, when you were like, "I need to know how all of this happened" — it would be kind of a running joke that people kept asking what her origin is! — finally we would do this big flashback story. And then the rest of the season would proceed as usual.
I can't remember why, but right before we started shooting — there must have been some logistical or production reason — we decided to move it to be the penultimate episode. So I did some quick rewrites to make it make sense to move it back a bit. It became a longer build-up, where you're seeing this person go through this journey, and then the penultimate episode provided more context for this journey you were watching.
TVLINE | OK, so it went from being the fourth episode to the eighth, and then the first.
Yeah. It was a long journey of hopping around!