‘Wonder Man’ renders the rest of Marvel moot

The show was spearheaded by Andrew Guest of Community (and fellow MCU show Hawkeye) alongside Destin Daniel Cretton, who, in addition to helming Marvel’s wuxia-inspired Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, also directed one of the best indies of the 2010s, Short Term 12. Thankfully, the low-key work of Cretton’s understated drama informs Wonder Man far more than Shang-Chi’s haphazard bombast. There’s only a single fight scene across Wonder Man’s four hours, and it lasts all of 30 seconds, which might make you wonder if Marvel Studios had anything to do with the series at all. It did, but this disconnect from a steadily souring brand rightly brings to mind the enthralling drama of Star Wars spin-off Andor; which is to say, both shows are a breath of fresh air.

In the comics, Williams is a white businessman who gains superhuman abilities after being experimented upon, though he would eventually fight alongside Marvel’s many heroes while becoming an actor and a stuntman. The latter is practically the only similarity to his TV equivalent: a frustrated, self-centered glorified extra who hopes to be cast in the role of Wonder Man, a pulp superhero introduced to him by his Haitian immigrant father. This version also appears to have had more nebulous energy powers and super-strength from an early age, but the show doesn’t bother with the logistics of his mutation. It’s simply something he hides for fear of becoming an outcast, and because real superpowers are frowned upon in Hollywood, if only for insurance reasons.

This makes for an intriguing dilemma: Williams’ job as an actor is to tap into his emotions and express himself, but the closer he gets to a state of rage, the more he runs the risk of smashing clean through a wall, or worse. He’s closed off about his identity, and his romantic relationships suffer in the process, but when he chances upon fellow actor Slattery—from whom he learns of the upcoming audition to play his favorite maverick—so begins a difficult journey to examining his own process of performing. 

Slattery last showed up in Shang-Chi, but his major role came in the Iron Man threequel, where he played the classic orientalist villain, the Mandarin—or so we thought. Kingsley turned out to be playing a timid English actor roped into portraying a terroristic figure on TV, in order to—unbeknownst to him—take the fall for the real bad guys. His life has been a legal nightmare ever since, but despite his naïveté, he retains the wisdom of an older, more experienced thespian, and the enthusiasm of someone who hasn’t yet found his big break, or been broken by the search. 

The outward dynamic between Williams and Slattery is, at first, based on their differing approaches to acting. Williams is an ardent pupil of Lee Strasberg’s “Method,” a process considered by many to be punishing for its psychological demands. He spends much of his prep on memory exercise, emotional recall, and pestering his directors with the minutiae of what his minor character might be thinking, feeling, wearing, or reading in a given scene. He’s a good actor, mind you—he’s just a bit of a pain. Slattery, on the other hand, has a more lyrical quality to his acting, and defines performance by instinct. His preparation is more calm and in-the-moment, leading the makeshift duo to butt heads over how best to audition.

This dichotomy is practically reverse-engineered from an apocryphal story on the set of the 1976 thriller Marathon Man, where rising star Dustin Hoffman—a student of more immersive American methods popularized in the 20th century—prepared for his role as an exhausted torture victim by staying awake for three days straight. In response, his legendary English co-star Laurence Oliver (who allegedly despised such shenanigans) simply retorted: “My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?” While the truth of this tale may have been stretched, it stands as an emblem of differing approaches to performance across the Atlantic, and, in the case of Wonder Man, affords both leads completely different in-roads to art itself. 

As much as the show involves fetch quests, celebrity cameos, and even a larger conspiracy—Slattery isn’t entirely forthright about why he befriends Williams—many topics of conversation circle back to what it is that Williams even wants out of acting. The core of the duo’s friendship involves figuring this out, and, as Slattery eventually puts it, learning to hold a mirror up to nature. This conclusion about the purpose of art is a vital step in Williams’ self-actualization, but it also has the secondary, likely unintended function of making the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe seem completely juvenile by comparison, as a series of films and shows where humanity is hardly a key concern, and the stories rely on heavy-handed political metaphors with little emotional grounding.

In contrast, Wonder Man’s character-centric nature ensures that the series’ politics prop up and support its drama, rather than substituting for drama itself. Williams’ powers, for instance, are expressed through the cinematic language of queerness, and although Wonder Man is far from an explicitly queer series (despite the bisexual lighting emanating from Williams’ very being), it remains grounded in the tale of a man whose family has long suspected that he may be different, and thus has, with what little emotional tools they possess, cared for him from a distance, even as it made him lonely. Slattery is, in this way, positioned as an older queer mentor who helps Williams see and accept himself. While the show gets no points on the “representation” front, its emotional mechanics end up deeply relatable, in a manner that Marvel’s other overarching metaphors—for example, the X-Men as symbols of queerness—often don’t.

This is because Wonder Man is also a story of persecution, and it never mixes its metaphors in the process. Many X-Men stories are, in broad strokes, about government and private forces locking up people with near-apocalyptic powers, who may genuinely be a danger to others or themselves, practically justifying in-world fascism. And while this is also technically true of Williams, the reason that a shadowy government agency ends up on his tail is not that he may harm someone, but rather, that a private facility meant to house superpowered individuals has a quota of prisoners to fill, not unlike real private prisons. Although Williams’ ethnicity isn’t explicitly touched upon in this regard, rewriting him to be a Black man further highlights the callousness with which modern U.S. government forces turn people into mere statistics.

In short: Wonder Man isn’t a show about real-world queerness or race, just as Andor isn’t a show about real-world fascism. However, both series employ the underlying political and emotional mechanics of these things in order to challenge their lead characters with aspects of themselves which they may not otherwise wish to confront. 

Eventually, the character-centric nature of Wonder Man is such a notable departure from other Marvel fare that the story’s climax arrives practically in disguise. Without spoiling too many details: an extended epilogue finds Williams embarking on what appears to be an exercise shadowing an unsuspecting everyman in middle America for the sake of a secret role. As one might soon suspect, this turns out to be a lengthy ruse in order to rescue and re-team with his dear friend Slattery, despite having been monstrously betrayed by him during the story.

Most other shows might have only hinted at William’ methods in this final act before quickly pivoting into action mode. However, in portraying the emotional lengths to which he goes, and more importantly, the ethical compromises he forces himself to commit—he betrays an innocent man the very same way he was betrayed: through lies about his objective and identity—he comes to both truly perform in a fully-embodied way, and truly understand the emotional rationale behind the actions of another human being, a man he called (and still calls) his friend. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that nothing else Marvel has made comes close to this level of emotional complexity, as a series in which characters learn to hold mirrors up to human nature, while the storytellers gradually do the same.