While some fans and reporters got a taste of Marvel Television’s “Ironheart” at Disney’s recent D23 Expo, the series, which was shot in May 2022, will likely not arrive until more than three years after it went into production. And so, the series has been relatively shrouded in a decent amount of mystery up until recently.
This much we know, created by Chinaka Hodge (“Snowpiercer,” “The Midnight Club“), Ironheart centers on Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the brilliant M.I.T. student who was first introduced into the MCU in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” eventually given a new hi-tech armored suit by the Wakandas.
However, she wasn’t allowed to keep it, so “Ironheart” follows the events of ‘Wakanda Forever’ and finds Williams lost and adrift. Returning home to Chicago, he discovers secrets that pit technology against magic, setting her on a path of danger and adventure.
The cast recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly and did the first real interview with any press about the series.
“Once this show begins, we’re definitely seeing the same girl that we got introduced to [in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever], but this time around, we’re getting a deeper dive,” Thorne told EW. “We’re getting to kind of understand the things that created the woman that we got a preview of. But we’re also seeing how those events are changing the way that she’s viewing her whole schtick.”
Thorne’s being vague, but details of the recent “Ironheart” trailer showed that Williams is fired from M.I.T. in the series, hence leaving Boston and coming back home to Chicago. As the trailer details explain, this disillusions her on many things, presumably her identity. When she meets the antagonist, The Hood, aka Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos from “In The Heights”), a dark, magical character, she starts to get into morally dubious behavior where money is the primary motivator.
“A bit of a battle ensues [upon her Chicago return] as she’s debating between or considering how she wants to use what she realizes is a powerful wealth of knowledge, realizing just how much genius she has in her, deciding what she’s going to do with that,” Thorne said. “We see that play out in the environment when she gets back home as well — she has these options. Who and how am I going to use these things that I now know about myself?”
Ramos also alluded to the idea of feeling betrayed by the system and then abusing one’s intelligence or powers to profit.
“We see this common thread between the characters…where it’s like, ‘How much can I get?'” Ramos explained. “And we see how that affects the characters positively and negatively. Characters start to use each other to get ahead and to get more, whether that’s more power…more money. It’s really cool to see that journey in how the characters start to interweave between one another’s stories.”
Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story“), who plays an unknown character and thus presumably a secret antagonist, says a morally gray world for these characters is what the showrunners wanted from the beginning.
“The first meeting that I had about this show, one thing that they said was that the mandate for this show was a show where no one is clearly good or evil, that everybody was really complicated,” Ehrenreich explained. “The show really is like a psychological, emotional portrait of each of these characters, especially Riri, but really everybody. You get to see all kinds of stuff, and it’s a world we haven’t seen before.”
“Ironheart” also stars Lyric Ross, Regan Aliyah, Manny Montana. Matthew Elam, Anji White and Sacha Baron Cohen in an undisclosed role (the rumors say the dark magical character Mephisto).
While no release date for Ironheart has been given, we know that it will arrive in 2025. If the series follows the same cadence as Marvel Television’s 2024 live-action schedule, it will likely hit sometime in the fall.