August 9th, 2021 
Jackson Murphy 
New animated series What If…? explores how the Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline would’ve been altered if certain things happened to certain characters. The show premieres this Wednesday August 11th on Disney+ and features voice recordings from many of the live-action superhero stars, including the late Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa. Writer A.C. Bradley and director Bryan Andrews dive into taking this from page *and mind* to screen.
Jackson Murphy: This is all about the choices that we make. So A.C., what were some of the most important choices you made when it came to making this season of this series?
A.C. Bradley: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think the first choice I made was answering the damn phone. To be honest, I had just come off of 80 episodes of animation that was all an interconnected universe that we wrote inside three and a half years. So I was a little burned out… a little exhausted, and I had a trip to go backpacking through Guatemala and Belize planned. I come into Marvel. I sit down with Brad Winderbaum, our studio exec who’s amazing, and he pitched me this show and I went, “Ah… okay, I gotta change my plans.”
A.C. Bradley: The other big choices were… We didn’t have a traditional writers’ room. Usually a writers’ room is five or six other writers. For a show this size, it would be about six other writers. I was like, “No. These are small. These are bite-size. These are unconnected. I wanna also – greedy as I am – write as many of these characters as possible. So I called my good friend Matthew Chauncey. We had done another show together. And I was like, “Do you wanna come and have fun in the sandbox?” And he went, “I’m getting married next week. But I can start the week after.” And then my other call was to Joel and Graham Fisher, two editors I worked with who are incredibly talented and very versatile editors. I was like, “Come on in! I need you to be able to basically jump from editing a heist movie to editing a comedy to handling a tragedy. Come play in the toy store.” And basically once you say that, people just join the ship. And they were the best choices I was able to make on the show, which was basically taking my friends and saying, “Let’s go have fun with some action figures.”
JM: Yes – you assembled some awesome people to help you out. Now that other franchise you were referring to was Trollhunters, right?
ACB: Yeah!
JM: Okay, because I talked with Marc Guggenheim a couple weeks ago for the Rise of the Titans movie…
ACB: I love Marc!
JM: He was telling me about all that everybody put into that saga in the last 10 years. Congrats on that and now this. Bryan, speaking of assembling, how did you assemble this cast and could you tell that they were instantly comfortable in now voicing the iconic characters they’ve been playing on screen for the last several years?
Bryan Andrews: Yeah, I think they were pretty comfortable. The assembling wasn’t me. That was Kevin [Feige], Louis D’Esposito and Victoria Alonso. They’re like, “Hey guys! We’re doing this thing. Why don’t you come play?” I just got to sit back and be happy that we got who we were able to get. People are busy. It’s hard to know who you’re gonna get, right? But luckily we got a lot of them. And I think they were pretty down and pretty excited to play slightly different riffs on their characters. Once they got into it, they were like, “Oh. Right. Okay! Cool! Alright, yeah, this is fun, right on!” I think they had fun exploring slightly different versions of the characters that they’ve played so well for so long. It was quite a blast being able to play with them in that regard. It was a lot of fun and ridiculous.
JM: Good. I enjoyed Josh Brolin as Thanos. He was funny. Who surprised you the most, Bryan, with their voice performance?
BA: Well… it’d be a shame to even point out anyone in particular because they’re all so fantastic and they all needed to do something a little bit different. Chris Hemsworth is amazing. His comedic chops are ridiculous. So what he did for us with Thor, in particular the Party Thor episode… hilarious. He’s amazing. He just ate it up. I think all the voices have been announced that you can look up, but Paul Rudd was fantastic. He’s so game to play. “I have no idea what… what’s going on? But here we go!” He had so much fun with it. Sebastian Stan really started taking to it. At first he was kind of, “Really? Am I allowed to do this?” And we’re like, “Yeah man! Go for it!” And then he started really eating it up. That was great. Everyone just came to the table and they played.
ACB: Can I just say that Paul Rudd was so Paul Rudd-y that Paul Rudd came in second for Employee of the Month after doing a three-hour record. That’s how beloved and amazing that man is.
JM: Ageless too, right?!
ACB & BA: Ageless!
JM: Now Jeffrey Wright as The Watcher says that this is “a prism of endless possibility”. So A.C., when it came to writing these episodes, what was that limitless freedom like for you and did you really have limitless freedom on these episodes?
ACB: When it came to writing them, at times it was a little daunting. I think the first episode took me a full 24 hours before I would write Interior Project Rebirth because these are such iconic stories. When it came to limits, there weren’t many. Stay away from the movies as much as possible and show us something new. So my first step is going into the character and finding what we haven’t explored… or seen in detail. With the T’Challa episode, it’s very much about fathers. It’s T’Challa’s relationship both with King T’Chaka and then this notion of a found father and found family. And the idea we kind of settled on was: you don’t have to choose. That’s the beauty of family. They love you for who you are wherever you are.
JM: Very important and powerful there. And I love the look of it too. Bryan, how was it creating that right comic book look that also has a lot of movement to it? It’s very lively just in even some of the subtle character movements.
BA: We wanted to go for a look that wasn’t just straight out of the comics. We thought about that. ‘It should just look Kirby!’ It would’ve been amazing; we would’ve loved that. But we wanted to push a little bit more. It needed to stand toe-to-toe with the movies and feel like it’s somewhat similar and/or adjacent. So it was too graphic or too stylized, it might be a little too much of a disconnect, at least for me coming from the movies. So I felt like we needed something else.
We went with old American illustrators as influences, especially J.C. Leyendecker. He had a very glorified way of showing an idealized way of showing the male and female form. They look like heroes already. Ryan Meinerding, the visual development god of Marvel, he always wanted to work in animation and he loves J.C. Leyendecker as well, so he was down with it. In combination with… our production designer to find out the realms that they exist – the backgrounds and make sure we can hone in a style that matches the look of the characters a little bit. And it’s still changing as we go. We got it there but it was so quick. There were some things in there we felt we needed and wanted. So we’re always tinkering with the knobs and dialing and playing with the art. It might be imperceptible to some people’s eyes but it is slightly evolving as it progresses.
JM: Sure, that makes sense. We have to talk about Chadwick Boseman. Obviously so many admired him from a bit afar in watching him on the big screen in so many big movies, including Black Panther. But what did he mean to you on a personal level and in working with him on this show?
ACB: Chadwick Boseman was a consummate professional. His love of T’Challa shone through. He cared about that character on a deeper level because he understood the importance of characters like Black Panther standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Captain America. Generations need to see this. Young people today need to see that a Black man saves the world, as well as seeing a woman save the world and seeing People of Color save the world. He understood the importance of T’Challa and therefore, when he came in to record, he gave it his all.
BA: True. And he’s The King. Forever and always, to me, he’s The King. There’s only one King. There’s always one T’Challa. And it was Chadwick Boseman.
JM: And he was amazing in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as well. Thank you so much for your time today. I love these stories and getting a new perspective on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I’m sure you two felt that as well.
BA: Oh yeah.
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