by Gill Pringle
After a brush with her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Maslany’s Jennifer Walters is suddenly forced to switch up her legal career, becoming an attorney specialising in superhuman-oriented legal cases.
And if being green wasn’t bad enough, she must also navigate the complicated life of a single, 30-something who also happens to be a 6-foot-7-inch super-powered hulk.
“What I love most about Jen aka She-Hulk is the fact that she’s a contradiction,” says Maslany, 36. “She’s so completely fixated on work, and yet she has this huge heart. She loves being She-Hulk, but at the same time resents it. There’s a lot of fun tension to play with in those contradictions.”
Just as her screen alter-ego owes much to Ruffalo’s Hulk, Maslany also feels indebted to the actor himself. “Mark was just so open to whatever my process was with coming to She-Hulk. He was never prescriptive,” says the actress who shares many scenes with Ruffalo during the nine-episode, Disney+ MCU series.
Getting into super shape to shoot the series, Maslany was immediately inspired by Ruffalo’s own commitment to the physicality of the role. “One thing I witnessed him do was… like he was lying down on the ground outside as Bruce and he gets up as Hulk. Like truly, from a lying down position, he’s suddenly standing. It’s remarkable to see,” she says.
“It’s easy when Mark comes to set and we are doing these kind of sibling scenes, where we’re ripping each other, but also love each other very much. It was a very easy dynamic to bring to camera because it just was right. It just made sense, and I feel like a lot of the characters in this show have that ring of truth that’s very easy to bring,” she says referring to the easy banter between She-Hulk and her BFF, Nikki Ramos, portrayed by Ginger Gonzaga.
“The script, also, I think, zeroes in on real human dynamics,” argues the Canadian actress who became accustomed to taking on different personalities with Orphan Black where she played the lead character, Sarah Manning, as well as a cohort of clones.
Ask Maslany how it felt to go from heels to Hulk, she laughs. “This was like going from shoes to heels to Hulk, and back again. Going to the courtroom was really exciting and fun. What’s so great about the show is that it has all those huge Marvel elements to it. Like, there are big set pieces. However, we also deal with She-Hulk, like, swipe dating. And we also deal with her helping her dad carry stuff into the garage. So, it’s all those little sweet moments that really made me excited to do this show.”
This quirky comedy series welcomes a host of MCU vets, not just Ruffalo but also Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky/Abomination and Benedict Wong as Wong, the cast fleshed out by Jameela Jamil, Josh Segarra, Jon Bass and Renée Elise Goldsberry.
Refreshingly, She-Hulk’s feminine slant doesn’t stop at its female protagonist, extending through to its creative team too, the majority of episodes directed by Kat Coiro with Anu Valia helming a further three episodes, and Jessica Gao serving as head writer.
A long time fan of She-Hulk, Coiro recalls, “I remember very vividly, being a little girl and seeing the cover of a She-Hulk comic amidst the sea of male comics. And just not knowing who she was or what this was but knowing that I was moved by it. And the idea of being large and in charge and taking control! Taking up space was something that really resonated with me. And I remember, I bought that comic book. And so, when this show came along, it was really the culmination of a real dream,” says the director who recently discovered her husband had an entire collection of the comics.
“We went to his mom’s basement and I got to go back through the comics and remember what was so exciting about She-Hulk. She’s irreverent, big, strong and bold.”
Created by Stan Lee and John Buscema, the character was introduced on Feb. 10, 1980, in “The Savage She-Hulk” comic series. She-Hulk went on to become a member of the Avengers in 1982 and was featured in the “Fantastic Four” series beginning in 1984.
“We were always looking for that balance between really honouring the comedy that was on the page and that the actors were bringing on the day, but also making something that fits into the MCU visually and feels cinematic. It was always going back and forth between those two things and finding ways to slot them both in,” adds Coiro.
Breaking the fourth wall in the same vein as Fleabag or Deadpool, Maslany enjoys teasing the audience. “I think that there’s something about She-Hulk’s awareness where she’s able to go from being Jen to She-Hulk with a seamlessness. Her consciousness stays the same. And she’s aware of the audience, that feels like it’s her superpower, in the meta element of the comic. It’s an extension of her superpower, when she’s like, ‘I know I’m talking to camera. I know you guys are watching this’. And there’s something about that super hyperawareness; that is who she is,” says the actress who has also appeared in The Woman in Gold, Stronger, and Destroyer opposite Nicole Kidman.
If She-Hulk is initially none too pleased about her new Hulk persona, then Maslany argues, “It was actually her conflict with it that I found most interesting; her resistance to it. She’s built this life for herself that she does not want to let go of; she’s worked so hard to be a lawyer and she has to constantly prove herself. She’s on this path. And then when this thing happens to her, she has to contend with a whole other perception being placed on top of her and expectations societally of how she should be and who she should be.
“And so, to navigate those two versions, the outside perception of her compared to her inner thoughts, that to me was super interesting. And honestly, when I read the pilot, I wanted so badly to audition for this because it’s so funny and also so mundane, in a way that I’ve always dreamed of watching a superhero show that had the between moments, the moments where you’re checking your phone, whatever – that to me is engaging cinema that I like,” says Maslany.
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law streams on Disney+ from August 18, 2022
