In the Running: Emmy Contenders in Conversation With The Ankler is a special series hosted by Prestige Junkie’s Katey Rich, Ankler Media awards editor. She chats with top talent from Disney networks and streaming platforms — including ABC, Disney+, FX and Hulu. In the Running is presented by Disney.
Shooting Disney and Marvel Television’s Wonder Man in Los Angeles wasn’t just a boon for creators Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest and the cast and crew, but the reason the show even existed in the first place.
“It was the genesis of the idea,” Cretton says. The comedy series focuses on a struggling actor named Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who is forced to hide his superhero abilities due to a government mandate that bans enhanced individuals from working in the entertainment industry.
“We built the entire show around this industry – what would Hollywood look like in the MCU,” Cretton continues. “It would have been ridiculous to shoot somewhere else.”
Nevertheless, “It was a dream because Marvel very rarely does L.A.,” adds Guest. “And this crew became very tight because we worked on either side of the strikes. It was over a year of all being together, and it was a project that felt personal to all of us because it was about all of us.”
That connection between the workers on set and the city was also paramount, Cretton says. “There’s no better crew than the crew in Los Angeles. A lot of the people who were working on our show were third-generation doing their jobs. They learned from their mom or dad, and that type of expertise is just so wonderful to have on our show in a story that is highlighting the work that they do.”
Told across eight episodes, Wonder Man tracks Simon’s efforts to break big alongside his burgeoning friendship with Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley), a disgraced actor who quite literally played the role of supervillain Mandarin in the 2013 Marvel film Iron Man 3 (as revealed in that film, Slattery was hired to play Mandarin as a subterfuge for the real villain of the story). Slattery later returned to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a supporting character in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, directed by Cretton.
“As far as chemistry between our two actors, that’s something you can never bet on,” says Guest, who previously worked on Community and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. “Luckily, Destin already had this incredible relationship with Sir Ben, and I think that loosened him up. And Yahya was so thrilled to work with Destin — I feel like Destin was able to sort of bring them together on camera.”
Cretton, for his part, “felt very lucky to be able to just watch these two grow together,” he says. “It was less about them becoming friends off camera and hanging out and going to meals and clubs together, and more about watching them really learn to respect each other in the work and create this chemistry on camera.”
In a bit of a meta twist, Wonder Man ends its first season with Simon landing his dream role: playing the superhero Wonder Man in a big-screen adaptation of the comic book.
“The thing I really wanted for the audience to feel was to care about Simon getting a role in a movie — and let it feel like life-or-death stakes to us, because it is to Simon, having that moment of breaking in. If we could communicate that, I felt like we were doing our job,” Guest says. “Hollywood always feels like a difficult place to make a living and pursue your dreams.”
