Ironheart coming out is a big deal. Not only because the show had taken a long while to be released after being announced but because Riri Williams isn’t that old of a character. She was first introduced in 2016.
The series, which stars Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, is completely out on Disney+ and it has been wonderful for fans of the comics. Riri is one of the few characters to be introduced into Marvel comics more recently and get a live-action adaptation. Other examples include Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who was first introduced in 1999, and then probably Uncle Aaron (Donald Glover) in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The turn around here for Riri is something worth celebrating.
So when I had the chance to speak to the executive producers of Ironheart, I asked them about the introduction to the character and giving her her own Marvel Cinematic Universe backing while still honoring the love that fans had for her comics.
Executive producer Zoie Nagelhout said “It’s an opportunity and a challenge, right? I think the opportunity is, because there aren’t as many comics on her, there’s a little more freedom. There’s a little more room for us to kind of create around her.” Nagelhout went on to talk about how writer Chinaka Hodge and the team of writers brought Riri’s story to life.
“Our head writer, Chinaka Hoge and our amazing team in the writer’s room really brought so much of themselves to it and so much of their imagination to it,” she said. “The challenge though, becomes how do you, especially when it came to her villains, we didn’t have a vast array of villains to choose from. But Parker Robins was a character that she had crossed paths with. So it was a really about digging through and finding and maintaining these incredible themes and emotional through lines that the comic book creators served up to us on the silver platter, but then also for the screen and for a six hour story plucking the things that maybe were less obvious and enhancing them.”
You can see my full chat with Nagelhout and Sev Ohanian here:
Ironheart is now streaming on Disney+
(featured image: Disney+)
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