Echo and What If...? star Devery Jacobs responds to "egregious" comments about Native American characters
There's more than enough space for them all.
Some viral comments questioned whether Echo and What If...? season 2, the two latest Disney+ shows from Marvel Studios, needed to explore Native American characters in depth, and actress Devery Jacobs has a quick answer for this profoundly dumb and offensive question.
Jacobs is part of both What If...? season 2, where she played the all-new heroine Kahhori, and Echo, where she has more of a supporting role as a character named Bonnie. Last night, during Echo's red carpet premiere, she was asked by The Hollywood Reporter about the comments which claimed Echo wasn't really needed (a stupid thing to say from the get-go since it'd been in development for years) after Kahhori's big moment in the second season of Marvel Studios' multiversal animated show. Her immediate reaction only seems logical: "Would somebody go up to a white guy and say, ‘This is the one perspective for a white story that is out there’? Would somebody go and say that?... That’s egregious, that’s insane that anybody would say that."
Given how utterly lacking (or limited at best) representation in Hollywood blockbuster productions has traditionally been, something which also affected Marvel Studios' projects until recently, all this online talk is nonsense, yet Jacobs gave a more paused and explanatory answer on top of her totally warranted reaction: "I think that the story of Kahhori in What If...? is astronomically different from that of Maya Lopez in Echo... I think one is talking about colonization and history and features Mohawk cultures and communities — the community that I come from — and the other is about an anti-hero, kind of a villain, who is coming back to her Choctaw Nation and to her family, and it’s really a dark crime noir family drama... And so, they’re both individual stories that absolutely deserve to be told."
After 33 movies plus a handful of TV shows set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, most of them focusing on and/or led by white actors, it's only just that more diverse stories and characters are allowed to blossom. It's taken Marvel Studios a good while to reach a point where the roster of heroes and villains doesn't look largely homogeneous, and none of the current problems they're facing are related to better representing the world we live in to create fiction for everyone to enjoy.
While Deadpool 3 is the only Marvel Studios movie set to release this year, more Disney+ shows are coming our way, and 2025 and beyond is looking quite busy, so be sure to check out our rundown of all the upcoming Marvel movies and TV series if you've lost track of the company's ever-changing plans.
