This week’s first season finale of Marvel Studios’ “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” went the meta route, breaking the fourth wall in far more extreme ways than the rest of the series had to date.
Not unexpectedly, that wasn’t the only ending that was considered. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, series star Tatiana Maslany revealed that head writer Jessica Gao told her that there were multiple versions of the ending.
In fact, one of the alternate ones was shot and “was very different, a little more serious and less like Jen’s version” says the acclaimed actress, who adds the actual ending felt much more in line with the overall tone of She-Hulk. She explains:
“Jessica and I talked about the ending a lot because, tonally, it could have gone in all kinds of different ways. Jess said that there were like 20 versions of it. I never saw 18 of those versions, but I did see two: the one that we went with and then one that we shot prior.
It was [more of] She-Hulk, so it was way too expensive, first off. And it had a different strategy to it. The thing that I love about this one is that we get back to Jen feeling like K.E.V.I.N.’s her collaborator and like an equal, and that her ideas deserve respect. Even sitting down on the ground and asking about the X-Men is like, ‘We’re buddies now,’ you know what I mean? Something about that feels very Jen, and feels very funny.”
Gao meanwhile tells Variety that the conversation between Jen and K.E.V.I.N. was based on actual conversations with Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige:
“That conversation between Jen and K.E.V.I.N. is very much the relationship that I have with real-life Kevin, and a lot of that is taken from conversations I’ve had with him. That scene was so much longer in the scripts. If they had let me, I probably would have written a ten-minute conversation of my avatar arguing with Kevin. This is probably the tightest version of what it could have been. There were a couple of jabs where Kevin was like, ‘OK, this is a little mean now.'”
The episode’s director Kat Coiro confirms Feige “had a huge hand in that finale and in the character of K.E.V.I.N.”. The full series of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” is now available everywhere on the Disney+ service.
