For all the talk about Marvel’s machine-like precision—previs locked, set pieces mapped, the train always moving—there’s obviously the iterative process of “fix it as you go.” And that’s the kind of scramble that happened on the “Hawkeye”: a late-arriving writer getting pulled in at the edge of the runway with a simple mandate to do whatever it took to get the season into shooting shape.
Writer Andrew Guest, who wrote on “Hawkeye” and also co-created and showran “Wonder Man,” said the call that brought him into Marvel’s orbit came during lockdown, right before Thanksgiving 2020, when everything was quiet, and timelines still felt elastic—until they didn’t.
“I got a call. I know[‘Avengers: Doomsday’ co-director]Joe Russo from having worked with him many years on ‘Community,’” Guest recalled on The Watch podcast this week. “He called me on the Sunday before Thanksgiving week of 2020. So it was lockdown. He knew I was home [laughs]. It was the week going into Thanksgiving. Everyone’s quiet. Everything’s quiet.”
Guest said Joe Russo pitched it bluntly: “‘Hey, the producer who did all our Marvel movies, Trinh [Tran], they need a new head writer on this project they’re doing. Are you free in the short term?’” Guest said. “And I said, ‘Sure.’”
Then, he said, the urgency hit immediately. “And she calls me three minutes later,” Guest explained. “She says, ‘I’m going to send you six one-hour episodes. I want to meet tomorrow to talk about it. We start shooting in New York in a week and a half, and we want to rewrite the whole thing.’”
Guest said the show had already been through multiple rewrite passes and there wasn’t much runway left. “I came in towards the end,” he said. “I mean, they had had a writer’s room. They had rewritten [the show] after that writer’s room a couple of times. I was literally the last call they could make to anybody…”
The host noted that by that stage, big Marvel set-piece sequences are often already planned—previs done, major beats committed—leaving writers to connect the tissue. Guest agreed that can be the reality, especially when things aren’t landing.
“When things are not working as well,” Guest said, “the thing I will say is that they want to make sure they shoot something and that they actually make it.”
And he described a familiar Marvel belief that the show can be fixed mid-flight. “And then I think there is this belief that we can ‘Fix it as we go,’” Guest said. “And that was very much the case with ‘Hawkeye.’”
The writer/procuer pointed to specific story and character problems he said needed attention right away. “You know, Hailee Steinfeld’s character was written too young,” he said. “The dynamic between her and Jeremy [Renner] wasn’t there.”
He also suggested the structure had gotten overcomplicated. “There was a lot of extra twists and turns that were sort of gumming up the works,” Guest said.
From there, he framed the work as an all-hands push with Marvel’s producing team—less a tidy rewrite than an exhausting sprint to get the season into shootable shape. “And we worked around the clock,” Guest said. “And I was very much involved with Trin and Brad Winterbaum, who was not running TV at the time, but was very hands-on on this project.”
Guest emphasized it wasn’t a solo hero narrative. “I needed their help as much as they needed mine,” he said. “And we got through that process.”
Given Guest’s candidness about the haphazard nature of making the series, which sounds like the case for many of their other shows, including the ill-fated “Secret Wars” series that suffered the most from the, “let’s just shoot it and fix it later,” it’s no real surprise the Marvel TV reckoning happened and sparked the overhaul to a more rigorous process and less-is-more regarding volume.
There’s been talk of a “Hawkeye” season two being a possibility, but right now, nothing is official. Watch the full podcast below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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