JESSICA JONES EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS TALK LUKE CAGE, KILLGRAVE AND MORE
Learn more about the characters in the next Marvel/Netflix series.
At the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour this week, Marvel’s Jessica Jones executive producer/showrunner Melissa Rosenberg and her fellow EP Jeph Loeb (head of Marvel TV) discussed the upcoming series – the second of the Marvel shows to debut on Netlfix, following this year’s launch of Daredevil.
Rosenberg and Loeb spoke about several of the key characters and casting choices in the series, centered around the Marvel comics superhero turned private eye, and the dark world she lives in, based on Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos' adult-themed Marvel comic, Alias.
Casting Krysten
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While Krysten Ritter has proven her talent for bringing a funny, sardonic edge to characters, she's never played someone in the superhero realm before - even an ex-superhero like Jessica. But Rosenberg and Loeb said she was bringing exactly the right sensibility to the role.
Rosenberg: Krysten has incredible range. We all know that she can deliver a dry line. We got a taste of it in Breaking Bad, her dramatic chops. She goes further than that to very dark, emotional places. What sells her-- first of all, the actress herself really is a superhero. The show is called Jessica Jones. She’s in every scene. We beat the crap out of her. You really get her strength of character, not in a noble way necessarily but she’s a tough broad.
Loeb: Jessica is incredibly damaged and justifiably so. I think one of the things they’ve worked so hard at and really delivered on and Krysten delivers in her performance is that you really understand who she is and where she comes from and what each of us might have done in that similar situation and that’s really where Marvel kind of sparkles, where you as the viewer has a connection on a level that has nothing to do with powers, nothing to do with costumes, nothing to do with comic books. It has everything to do with being a human being and "What would I do" if that were that case?
Purple Man
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avid Tennant has been cast as Killgrave, AKA Purple Man in the comics – a villain whose storyline in Alias is extremely dark and twisted, in relation to his history with Jessica.
Loeb: When you see the dynamic between Krysten Ritter and David Tennant, who plays our villain, the question of what’s going to happen next and what could happen next and how that’s driven by character is something that’s so important, not just to the scripts but to the way the show is shot and the way everybody reacts and the way those two actors react with each other. In the same kind of way Vincent D’onofrio owned his half of Daredevil, you’ll see David Tennant own his half of Jessica Jones so that you’re continually finding this incredible balance. I think one of the things that Melissa handled so beautifully is that there are times where there are questions about what the villain is doing and you will be uncomfortably okay or not so much against what he’s doing until you g,o “Oh no, you’re really the villain. You really are a horrible person.”
Rosenberg: [Tennant] came up right away but he wasn’t available and then he became available and we were still looking and we grabbed him as fast as we could.
Loeb: Sometimes what happens is you make a wish list of people you hope will be able to do it and David was right at the top. Things sometimes change and when they do, one of the things that Marvel is very good at is being sort of nimble so if we can move something around that’s what we do and this just happened to work out that way.
Cage
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Mike Colter will appear in several episodes of Jessica Jones as Marvel’s Luke Cage, who will then get his own Netflix series.
Loeb: What’s great about it is that, first of all, you get to meet Mike Colter and I think that’s really the thing that’s most generous of what Melissa did is to allow this show to offer him an opportunity for people to get to know him. He is important to the show and he is important to the story of Jessica Jones and who she is. It would not be Jessica Jones unless you at least understood how Luke affected her life and where she is. What’s wonderful about it is they’re still very early on in this world so who he is and what he’s doing and where he is in his story, allows us to tell a great deal of story that happens before and story that happens afterwards. So you’re getting him not quite in the middle, but sort of in the early part of the middle. So when we get to start on the Luke Cage show, you'll have hopefully watched Jessica, so you know who Luke is, but his story and where he came from and most importantly where he’s going is what that series is about and so it will very much feel like you can watch that show and never have seen Jessica. But in the same kind of way, there’s something about -- there’s only a handful of us that can actually say this -- there’s something about watching Jessica that makes it feel like the same world as Daredevil but there’s nothing in it that makes you say “I wish I had watched Daredevil to understand what is going on.”
It exists in it’s own way in the same kind of way that Daredevil exists in it’s own way and Luke Cage will be the same way and so will Iron Fist. Each will be a way of introducing the characters to the audience so that when they all do get together, you’ll have that same experience that you have when you went to go see the Avengers. It was sort of an extraordinarily bright light bulb that appeared above my head when I went “Oh, I see. Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, make those movies then go make the Avengers movie. Let’s see.... Take the street level heroes and let’s see whether or not we can get to the Defenders.” We just needed a platform that was able to tell those stories in a way that they could be uniquely their own and in the same kind of way, exist in the same world and that’s what Netflix afforded us to be able to do.
Hellcat
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Rachael Taylor will play Patricia “Trish” Walker in Jessica Jones – known in the comics as Patsy Walker, the Avenger and Defender called Hellcat (though it’s still not confirmed whether we’ll see Trish in costume in the series). Patsy Walker’s comic book history runs back to the 1950s, when she starred in romance comic books, before getting a superhero overhaul and Loeb spoke about how all of that informed her depiction in the series.
Loeb: When we first sat down to talk about who Jessica’s world was going to be populated with, Melissa talked about the kind of character that she wanted her to be friends with and that it was important that there was somebody in her life who made it all look easy but not necessarily felt that way. One of the things that we’ve talked about from the very beginning is that, as many people know, the show at one point was referred to as AKA Jessica Jones and we used to refer to the AKA of it. Every single person has an AKA in their life, which is this is the person they’re presented by and this is who they actually are. How true is that in life? Here we are, wonderful professionals who are talking elegantly all the time and you can imagine that’s how we are all the time. We never have a bad day and we never say anything wrong. That kind of looking at that situation. When we started talking about who in the Marvel universe fit that category, one of the things that we talked about was the character of Patsy Walker or as we refer to her as Trish. It was literally a five-minute conversation where we said we have this character and this is who she is and all of a sudden Melissa lit up and went “We can do that. That’ll work.”
What’s kind of lovely is if you go back and go all the way back to the 1950s, because that’s how long the character has been around, and you realize who Patsy Walker was and what it meant and how she then grew up and she went through the period of being a model and all that stuff, Melissa and the writers gave that history it’s own kind of unique spin. I think that when people see it, they’ll recognize that it very much not only works for today’s audience but in the same kind of way, gave Rachael Taylor a very real and grounded place. But what was most important was the relationship between her and Jessica and how these two women who in some ways are sisters, in terms of their friendship, could be that different and yet on the same token, believe in the same kinds of things and that question of what is it to be a hero and the responsibilities that you have when you have abilities is something that brings them together and also continually pushes them apart.
I think we’re very lucky to have Melissa as a writer who really grasps the insight of what it is to have a friendship with a woman and the way that two women can actually be competitive and friendly and love each other and hate each other and have a history with each other and having grown up with three sisters and no brothers, I watched that dynamic happen all the time and every single thing that these two actors are doing always rings true. They’re some of my favorite scenes to be able to see Rachel and Krysten work together.
Jessica's Differences from Daredevil
Elaborating on comments she'd made at an earlier panel about the differences between Jessica Jones and Daredevil, Rosenberg and Loeb noted Jessica will also fight very differently from the Man Without Fear.
Rosenberg: It really comes down to the characters. They’re very different kinds of characters. Jessica is about paying rent, getting the next client. She’s dealing with a fairly dark past. She’s trying to get through the day. She’s not really trying to save the city, she’s trying to save her apartment. At her core, she does share something with Matt Murdoch that he’s more aware of. At her core, she wants to do something good. She wants to contribute to the world. But there are a lot of personality issues for her that could get in the way. They’re such different characters. Matt has been studying Martial arts. He has extraordinary fighting skills. Jessica Jones is a brawler. She gets drunk, she gets pissed off and then boom! You’re down. She doesn’t have a costume. She doesn’t have a mask. She’s an extremely blunt, direct person and that applies to the action as well.
Loeb: One of the things that we’ve talked a lot about is that in many ways Jessica is a psychological thriller first and a superhero show second. So when you talk about things like what’s the action going to be like and the regular things you would get from a superhero show, it’s going to be different. What you get out of Jessica is a sort of hold your breath tension as to what’s going to happen.
