Another day promoting Twilight: Breaking Dawn, and even more comes out about ABC’s adaptation of the comic book series Alias from the project’s writer, Melissa Rosenberg.
The latest comes from IO9, where Rosenberg reveals several tidbits:
– What’s her deal, power-wise? “Jessica Jones is also kick ass,” Rosenberg says. “She’s this incredibly damaged, flawed superhero with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and she too is trying to find her place in that universe. Is she superhero, is she a human? Her powers are kind of B-level, so she can’t quite cut it in the superhero world. It’s just a really delicious character.”
– The Purple Man is “very much a part” of the story, though Rosenberg stresses that “he may, or may not, have that name.” “She’s really suffering of the trauma of having been violated by this guy. So that plays a huge part of the plot of the first season, and probably in her series arc,” Rosenberg reveals. She’s not too sure if Killgrave will retain his distinctive purple skin on TV. “I doubt it,” she says. “It may become too cartoony for the tone of it. But who knows? I mean, we have to get in there, we have to get a greenlight for the script first and get in there and design it. But, you know, I’m open to interpretations of him. The tone of this is very gritty and very real, and I’m not sure if purple skin will do it. Maybe he’ll put on a purple suit…”
– On how Jessica’s affliction with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stres Disorder) will affect the character. “My father-in-law is a psychiatrist and he even said, I can’t believe all superheroes don’t suffer from PTSD given what they go through,” Rosenberg reveals. “I’m only interested in characters who are wrestling with inner demons. It’s much more interesting to me than external bad guys. Although, there certainly will be plenty of those. But we have Luke Cage, whom we’re really glad to have. You can’t do the series without Luke Cage. And Carol Danvers, Ms. Marvel. So, each one of them will have… Luke Cage has a backstory. We may be introducing something that might complicate his backstory a little bit.” Will this complication conflict with what we know of Luke Cage/Power Man from the comics, and break his canon? “Maybe a little bit — you have to stay true. Luke Cage is a Marvel Universe character, you really have to stay true to who he was, but there are some… yeah. There are some things that might surprise you. So the answer to that is, Yes and no. I’ve learned from Twilight that there’s only so much canon-breaking you can do,” she says.
– Will we see Jessica Jones’ sometime-fling Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, in the series? “I don’t know if Ant-Man is going to be available to us. The trick is if they have their own movie coming out, then probably not. But I don’t know that Ant-Man has his own movie, so I’m hoping he’s going to be available to us. But there’s thousands of characters, there’s really no limit to what we can’t use in terms of finding someone with similar powers. There’s also various different characters that they reinvent every couple of decades,” Rosenberg says. To that we say “DARKHAWK!” Kidding. Just wanted to throw a Darkhawk reference into there.
There are other things that Rosenberg had to say about AKA Jessica Jones (can we please get a better title?) as well as several other projects she’s working on. You can read the full IO9 interview here.
