As Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer Walters changes into She-Hulk in public, she has to deal with trolls.
“She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” by Marvel immediately and irreverently leans into social media and toxic masculinity, precisely men’s online obsession with women’s bodies and existence.
“When the show first came out, I was getting these horrible, mean messages from trolls,” series director Kat Coiro told IndieWire in a Zoom interview after the finale. “Just horrible things like “You should die” and other horrible things.
But as the series has gone on, that has started to go away because we’ve started talking back to the trolls. The bad guys are the trolls. I think these people know that they are giving us a chance to help them when they do that.”
“We knew we would be attacked because that’s what happens to women in this world and with this philosophy,” she said. “So it’s been fun to say, ‘Yeah, we knew you were going to say mean things to us, so we put you in the story.’
Also, the first time we saw She-Hulk, she was played by Maslany’s body double, Malia Nahinu, who was 6’5″ and had green CGI skin and curly hair. People had a lot to say about She-look Hulk when the trailer and series first came out, but that has changed throughout the nine episodes.
“It surprises her,” Coiro said. “We’ve never seen a VFX character look like this before, so it took some time for people to get used to her. Now that they have, I’m glad we’re just talking about the show and not her body because that’s the whole point.”
“As bad as the feedback can be, it’s still a way to connect,” Coiro said. “It’s about people caring a lot about something, and if we can turn that into something good and make people say, ‘Oh, this is really fun,’ then I think we’ve done a great job.
It’s not easy to steer a conversation in that direction and keep online trolls from harassing people, and the “She-Hulk” team didn’t set out to do it. But that’s what happens when you have a female superhero (still rare in Marvel) whose name is also the same as a well-known male hero.
When Jen talks about dealing with her anger and being taken seriously, these aren’t new problems that being a Hulk has given her. These are things she has to deal with every day.
Coiro said, “I always wanted to make sure there were undertones.” “I’m not making a show with direct feminist messages, but it’s a part of the story because she’s a woman figuring out the world… Not because that’s the show’s main point but because it’s told by many women, and we all had our own stories to tell.
With a room full of mostly women writers, “She-Hulk” was able to talk about harassment, stalking, muggings, and more, but with a unique sense of humor and the authority of people who have been through these things. The “She-Hulk” team knows that anyone who has been chased down a dark alley or attacked by someone more robust feels “real fear” on a “visceral level.” The show also has a way out that most other shows and movies don’t: in every episode, Jen breaks the fourth wall and talks to the camera.
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Coiro said it simply: “It’s awareness.” “We know—and Jennifer Walters knows—that she’s on a T.V. show, that she has a platform, and that people are watching her. When you break the fourth wall, you get to be a little more self-aware, so you can talk about these things in a pretty exciting way.”
The show’s head writer, Jessica Gao, was a big fan of breaking the fourth wall, so Coiro’s team shot more than what made it into the show. However, they didn’t want to rely on it too much. Instead, Jen’s time was spent getting to know her cousin Bruce (Mark Ruffalo), her coworkers Nikki (Ginger Gonzaga) and Pug (Josh Segarra), as well as her parents (Tess Malis Kincaid and Mark Linn-Baker).
“If you do it too often, it takes her out of the story,” Coiro said of breaking the fourth wall. “We really needed [those bonds] to be real and not be constantly interrupted by her relationship with us, the audience.”
Coiro is glad that the conversation about “She-Hulk” has moved from the first round of online trolling to the characters’ story arcs, even though it’s still unclear how they fit into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“The whole huge universe fits in Kevin Feige’s brain, and I don’t mean K.E.V.I.N. the robot, I mean the real Kevin,” Coiro said, referring to the A.I. Marvel mastermind from the “She-Hulk” finale. “It’s a really collaborative environment, so everyone will throw out ideas, and then he’ll say, “No, we can’t do that.” You don’t always know why, but you know something big is coming.
