She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: Tatiana Maslany on working with Mark Ruffalo and more

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is out this week and it means that there’s a new Hulk in town. Featuring actress Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters aka She-Hulk, the show is a 9 episodes-long legal comedy that brings the comic book character to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only is it an origin story for Walters as she juggles between her career as a lawyer who also happens to be a 6-foot-7 green superhero, but it also brings back fan favourite characters. Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner/Hulk will stick around to help his cousin, Benedict Wong’s Wong is back and so is Tim Roth’s Abomination. But the show is a lot more than its cameos. 

At a press conference attended by Maslany, Ginger Gonzaga, executive producer and head director Kat Coiro and showrunner Jessica Gao, the cast and crew opened up about the show’s format, working with Mark Ruffalo and more. 

Breaking the fourth wall is a major element in the show, something we’ve seen in the MCU with Deadpool. But Kat Coiro says, “I like to say that she was doing it long before Deadpool or Fleabag.” Opening up about the format that is drawn from the comic books, Jessica Gao explained, “For me, foundationally, I felt like first and foremost was the fourth wall breaking and the kind of meta humour and the self-awareness. It was the John Burn run that made me fall in love with this character. It was just so lighthearted and fun and refreshing. So that was always kind of a foundational element. And because I come from TV  comedy, like, comedy was a priority. But then, what’s great about having such an incredible cast is, then it feels like you’re cheating a little bit as a writer. Because they come in and they really just imbue  this, humanity and realness to these characters.” 

Mark Ruffalo has been playing Hulk for a while and Tatiana Maslany certainly took some cues from him. She said, “One thing I did witness him do was like he was lying down on the ground outside as Bruce and he got up as Hulk! Like truly, from a lying down position, he’s suddenly standing.” It looked incompletely inhuman. And I was like oh, that is like 10 years of playing this character and like physically embodying him and like being so inside of him, like you get to do cool stuff like that,” she added.