Audiences first met Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez in Hawkeye. In Echo, Maya is being pursued by Wilson Fisk aka Kingpin’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) criminal empire. When the journey brings her home, she must confront her own family and legacy.
The series will also simultaneously launch on Hulu, with all five episodes available to watch at once.
Echo marks several firsts for Marvel Studios. As noted above, this series is quite a bit grittier than its predecessors, hence the TV-MA rating. Director and executive producer Sydney Freeland told reporters at a recent press screening and event for the series that she and the creative team wanted to “lean into” Maya’s villainess.
“We wanted very, very adamantly to show that people on our show, they bleed, they die, they get killed, and there are real consequences,” she said, adding that she looked to previous Marvel series like Daredevil and Punisher for narrative and visual inspiration.
Those series, which originally debuted on Netflix, are known for having a much darker tone than most content in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though that is set to change with Echo and presumably Daredevil: Born Again.
Freeland continued: “It’s not the fate of the universe at stake, because I think once you go that broad, you can lose sight a little bit. So that kind of dictated the tone a little bit.”
One of the key sequences in the series, which is showcased in the trailer, features the “birth of a villain” after Maya snaps a man’s neck. In the trailer, the clip cuts immediately back to a shot of young Maya walking away with Kingpin, just as he’s explaining to her that they might not be all that different.
“Maya is in a very vulnerable, emotional place,” explained Freeland. “She’s got all this bottled up emotion and rage and feeling inside of her, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. There’s going to be somebody there to give her a little nudge, give her a little push, and that person is Kingpin. We always talked about the [writers] room is that Kingpin’s superpower isn’t strength. It’s his intellect and his ability to psychologically manipulate people.”
Leaning into the more corrupt side of the Marvel universe wasn’t the only priority for Freeland. She didn’t take lightly that she would be tasked with creating a vibrant narrative for the franchise’s first live-action Native American and deaf character.
As Navajo herself, Freeland grew up on a reservation in New Mexico. She explained that she grew up reading Marvel comics, surrounded by Native culture, but those two parts of her life rarely — if ever — overlapped. So, taking up the mantle at Marvel with Maya and her story signaled a great responsibility for Freeland, one she intended to take seriously.
First, she and her team settled on writing Maya as a member of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma.
“The comic book is beautiful, but it just has all this arbitrary Native American imagery,” she said. “So it was a hodgepodge of cool imagery that just made this muddied, inauthentic backstory for the character. That was one of the first things that we did was, ‘Okay, this is Choctaw. All roads lead here.’ Then we build out from that.”
Echo also stars Chaske Spencer (Sneaky Pete), Graham Greene (Defiance), Tantoo Cardinal (Three Pines), Devery Jacobs (Reservation Dogs), Zahn McClarnon (Dark Winds), Cody Lightning and Vincent D'Onofrio (Godfather of Harlem) along.
Episodes of the series are directed by Sydney Freeland and Catriona McKenzie. Executive producers are Kevin Feige, Stephen Broussard, Louis D'Esposito, Brad Winderbaum, Victoria Alonso, Richie Palmer, Jason Gavin (Blackfeet), Marion Dayre and Sydney Freeland. Co-executive producers are Jennifer L. Booth and Amy Rardin.
You can watch the trailer for Echo below.
