The first striking element you might notice about Marvel’s new Disney+ crime series, “Echo,” is that it’s darker, grittier, more mature, and has a TV-MA rating (Mature Audience Only. Intended for adults and may be unsuitable for children under 17). That’s a first for Marvel (and an R-rated “Deadpool 3” is coming in the summer of 2024, signaling more to come), but to hear it from the filmmakers, the contents of the show and the character’s dark past led to the rating, not the other way around
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“It’s our first TV-MA show, but we didn’t set out to make a TV-MA show,” executive producer Brad Winderbaum said in a recent “Echo” press conference. “We set out to make a Maya Lopez [Echo] show. This is a character who has a violent past, who’s dealt with some real trauma, who has really difficult decisions to make, and who ultimately has to confront the people she loves in order to grow and change. Following this character created the tone. It created a grittier, more grounded story for the audience. That just so happened to be more adult. More TV-MA. But it really was always born from Maya as a character.”
As fans know, Maya Lopez, aka Echo’s arc, is all about major growth and change as she first began as a thuggish bad guy, introduced in the “Hawkeye” series starring Jeremy Renner in 2021.
“One of the most interesting aspects about the character is the fact that she’s a villain in Hawkeye,” series head writer and exec producer Sydney Freeland said, explaining her arc and how it continues to evolve on the show. “But then within that, once you start, sort of, pulling in that thread, then you look at where she comes from. And you look at, ‘Oh, this is a deaf, indigenous amputee girl from Oklahoma. How the hell does she end up being one of the top-ranking lieutenants in Kingpin’s army?’ And answering those questions was such an exciting place to be.”
While “Echo” is a crime series, born from her time on “Hawkeye” and as a villain, as its star Alaqa Cox stressed, it’s a series about family and rediscovering your roots.
“Maya is a deaf indigenous person who has a biological family and an adopted family,” Cox explained, intimating that her adopted family was the one of crime. “And she’s trying to reconnect with her family after finding out that her adopted family, her uncle specifically [The Kingpin played by Vincent D’onofrio], betrayed her. So, she [goes] back to reconnect with her biological family and try to rediscover a more complicated and deeper life that she [had] lived and rediscovered family. So, I’m hoping that she can learn, and we can all learn, how she rediscovered family.”
Cox spoke about how she aligned with and connected to her character, speaking about many shared experiences that helped her take on the role. “We’re similar,” she said. “I was raised with some trauma… we both have childhood traumas that we’re raised with. And it was different. As you know, I am an amputee. So, I went through many different kinds of surgeries as a child. And so, that made me a warrior, in a sense. And Maya, she had the death of her mother and all these tragic events that happened in her life. So, we both have different traumatic experiences. We’re both warriors, and we’re tough, and we’re badass.”
In the “Echo” series, Maya goes through a redemptive arc, but it’s not squeaky clean and superheroic; the filmmakers are well aware she came from a murderous syndicate of criminals who did horrible things and aren’t trying to necessarily tidy that all up.
“The goal was never to try to turn her into, like, Captain America,” Freelander said about turning her away from the darkness of her past but not completely scrubbing it over either. “In the conversations with Marvel, the response was like, ‘Hey, let’s lean into that. Let’s see if we can push it out a little. Let’s see how far we can go down that rabbit hole.’ And so, really, the tone and the visual style came from the story and the circumstances of the character.”
Authentic representation is a big part of the “Echo” story, and the Indigenous people whose story is being told is that of the Choctaw nation. Sydney Freelander is a Najavo native, and she stressed that engaging the Choctaw Nation to seek their blessing was an absolute necessity.
“I remember we came and presented to you all at the Choctaw Center,” Freelander recalled. “One was to ask permission from the Choctaw Nation to be portrayed because I feel like a lot of times what happens with Native and Indigenous stories is that people come in and they say, “We’re going to tell you what the story we’re going to tell.” And we wanted to take a different approach, and we wanted to engage you.”
“The second part was like, ‘Can we create a dialogue?’” she continued. “We want to hear we want to be as authentic in our portrayal of the Choctaw language, the Choctaw culture, the Choctaw experience as we can I think a lot of times people tend to jumble all Native American tribes and cultures into this one big kind of monolith, and that’s not the case. Every tribe is different; every language is different, and every culture has its own unique specificities.”
Devery Jacobs from “Reservation Dogs” has much experience working on a show run by indigenous people, in that case, specifically writer/creator/director Sterlin Harjo. She plays Maya Lopez’s cousin in the series, who is also a friend in need when she needs it the most.
“To borrow from the disabled community and a saying that they have coined, they say ‘nothing about us without us,’” Jacobs said about how the show was created and designed by the people of these communities for the people of these communities.
“And I think that’s so true for any marginalized community, including indigenous folks,” she continued. “And I think when it comes to telling our stories, making sure that there are as many storytellers from that community as possible is paramount. And there’s been a hundred years of lack of representation and misrepresentation and intentional exclusion of indigenous voices in Hollywood. So, I think to have us be a part of these conversations is integral to making sure that we’re able to tell our stories accurately.”
Executive producer Brad Winderbaum went as far as to say that he saw “Echo” as the future of Marvel due to the way it has shown a new side of the MCU and the way its character has dictated the style of storytelling.
“I think Marvel is at its best when the storytellers follow the character and let the character kind of lead the dance, lead the journey,” he said. “And we knew, as soon as we cast Alaqua in ‘Hawkeye’ and saw what she did on screen in that show, that she would be an incredible character to follow into her journey.”
He also alluded to the fact that “Echo” is the first of its kind in that it’s a Marvel Spotlight, a new banner meant for more stand-alone stories unconnected to the greater MCU.
“Maya allowed us to see a corner of the MCU that hadn’t been seen before,” he continued. “And to me, that is the future of Marvel. It is being able to tell stories that are unexpected. Stories that operate on the fringe of what we’ve seen before, and are standalone, Character focused, and have a unique personality all their own.”
“Echo” premieres simultaneously on Disney+ and Hulu on January 9.
