We are back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you feel fatigue stealing over you already, banish it! It’s going to be OK. Even though Wonder Man is (by my incredulous reckoning) about the 30th MCU series produced by Marvel Television and companions – from the dizzying heights of WandaVision to … well, She-Hulk – it is a little gem.
And it is quite little, in MCU terms. Not only are the eight episodes only around half an hour long but they also eschew spectacle in favour of storytelling. It’s a radical idea, but you never know, it might catch on.
The story is that Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who plays the DC Comics’ character Black Manta in the Aquaman films) is an actor who has been trying to make it in LA for the last decade. Alas, his inability to stop overthinking a role makes him an utter pain on set and gets him fired even when he does manage to land a part. But he has loved the Wonder Man character all his life and when the chance comes to audition for a role in a superhero film about him, Simon leaps at it. There he is befriended by Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley, who plays Trevor in various MCU films, a washed-up, drug-addled actor who is hired by Iron Man 3’s baddie to play “the Mandarin”, who is the terrorist leader of the Ten Rings – do keep up).
Always beware befriending an actor. Trevor is the cat’s paw of the Department of Damage Control, the shadowy government organisation set on protecting the public from supernatural threats with a modern prison to fill before its budget is cut. And the DODC has been tracking our man Simon since he was 13 and emerged unscathed from a house fire that should have killed him. It is not, we gather, just his love for the shonky Wonder Man films he watched as a child with his father that draws him to the role. Ignorant of the DODC’s existence, Simon still keeps his powers hidden because in this Hollywood, people with such abilities are forbidden to work after an on-set disaster that is the subject of an entire episode (beautifully done, even if it interrupts the momentum) about halfway through the series.
The real meat of the thing, however, is not the superheroics, repressed or otherwise. It lies in two things. First, in the meticulous and moving examination of the growing friendship between the men. Trevor’s pose as a mentor becomes increasingly real as, with shades of Olivier’s advice to the very method actor Dustin Hoffman, who exhausted himself during the making of Marathon Man (“Dear boy – why don’t you just try acting?”) and Noël Coward’s advice to all actors (“Speak up, and don’t bump into the furniture”), he teaches the less experienced man to get out of his own way and improve his career and, by extension, his life.
Second, we get a meditation on the film industry and a masterclass – several, really – on the art of acting. No, this is not a sentence I thought I’d be writing about a dusty piece of MCU intellectual property either. But what a joy to be doing so! We follow Simon as he puts together audition tapes, talks about character choices, finds different spins, stories and intonation, and watch as he/Abdul-Mateen puts them together. And we have Trevor/Kingsley advising him on alternative techniques, discussing his options, showing us what having a supportive line reader off camera can do, and demonstrating the difference a lifetime of immersion in the stage as well as screen can make. At one point, the actor-characters simply sit and trade some of their favourite speeches – from Shakespeare to Amadeus’s Salieri – and the boundaries between them, between the actor-characters and the actors and us, begin to blur. It’s as neat a demonstration of art and its powers as you could find.
For those who want more of the superhero stuff, Wonder Man will disappoint. There are moments when we see Simon’s rumbling powers build and occasional scenes when they are unleashed. But the strength of this show lies in its depiction of the relationship between the leads and its interrogation of the effects of art and how it gets corrupted. Forgive me, but it’s a rather clever, tender and altogether wonder-ful thing.
• Wonder Man is on Disney+ now.
