Ben Kingsley, who reprises his role as Trevor Slattery in the upcoming race-swapped Wonder Man show, shared more details about what the show is actually about.
Kingsley told Entertainment Weekly the show is “a journey of two guys in Hollywood that’s really entertaining.”
“We look at the casting process, we look at the auditioning process, we look at the directing process, the writing process,” he elaborated. “We look at the ego traps. We look at the seductive side of fame. We look at everything that’s beautiful and good, and also everything that’s vulnerable and rather unhealthy, but in a very entertaining, non-judgmental way.”
As for the series place in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Kingsley said, “He manages to escape from the real Mandarin and from Shang-Chi land, and he flies back into Hollywood to give his career a second chance and to prove to his dear mother Dorothy, who always had faith in him and his talents, that he was truly the actor his mom always hoped he would be and that he always aspired to be.”
“And a series of extraordinary events place him exactly in that space, which crowns him and compromises him at the same time. He’s pulled in two directions at the same time,” he added. “[Trevor is] faced with a terrible dilemma: he can reach his ambition, but it’s at a terrible cost. He has a choice to make — it’s fascinating.”
That choice will seemingly involved the race-swapped Wonder Man played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, “[Trevor] sees in Simon a friend, a colleague, but he also sees Simon as someone he can absolutely exploit for his own ends. It’s quite a classic, basic human condition story. You are associated with somebody and you have an affinity with that person, but at the same time, you know that you’re going to have to exploit that person to get to where you need to be.”
Kingsley also revealed that there will be flashbacks in the series as well, “This] series does see Trevor before he got the role of Mandarin, and then of course after, so it’s a real biography — it’s a biopic of Trevor in four episodes.”
Abdul-Mateen II had previously shared in an interview with Empire that “the show is self-aware, without looking directly into the camera. There’ll be commentary about superhero fatigue and things like that, but to me, it’s just dressing. That’s not really the aim of the show. The focus of the show is about an actor’s journey. It’s about a journey of friendship.”
Similarly, Marvel TV boss Brad Winderbaum told Entertainment Weekly in October that the show “takes place within the MCU, but it’s a story about Hollywood. And it’s a story about not just Hollywood, I would say it’s a story about acting and the journey of an actor in Hollywood, of having to balance being an artist with making money and very grounded ideas that anyone who came up in Hollywood or in the arts in general can relate to. I certainly could on a very deep level.”
NEXT: Disney To Make Live-Action Gaston Film From ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ Writer
Race swaps are always terrible. I love blade with a passion. And if they made him white I would also be pissed. They would never do that though.
No Blunder Man for me. I like my white heroes and villains to stay white. I even want my white Daily Planet editors-in-chief to stay white.