There’s a simple reason why Madisynn King, She-Hulk‘s breakout original character, didn’t deliver a crowd-pleasing encore in the Disney+ series’ season finale.
The answer: the finale was in fact filmed first and Madisynn had yet to even be cast, so there was no predicting the reaction the party girl would receive, let alone after Episode 4 had streamed to the world.
“She was definitely a favorite character,” She-Hulk: Attorney at Law head writer/exec producer Jessica Gao noted during an in-depth Q&A with TVLine, “but we wrote the whole season before casting it.” (And as director Kat Coiro separately shared with us, the finale actually was the first episode filmed.)
“We all were completely delighted with the character, but never in writing her did we think that she would go that big!” said Gao. “It wasn’t until Patty Guggenheim was cast and we saw her work that we were like, ‘Ohhh, this is going to be a breakout character — the Madisynn Supremacy.’
“But if I had known it was Patty Guggenheim from the beginning, she absolutely would have been in not just the finale, but more episodes,” Gao avowed.
(TVLine then suggested that in the finale’s mid-credits scene, in which Wong portals into the DODC to spring Emil Blonsky, it may have sufficed to simply hear Madisynn in the background beckon for her “Wongers!” — to which Gao added, “Or you just see her walking by in the background, holding a vodka-and-yak milk.”)
Director Kat Coiro, who had previously worked with Guggenheim and in turn sold everyone on casting her in She-Hulk Episode 4, told TVLine, “It was so gratifying to watch her explode in this role. I remember when I put together my director’s cut on the finale, I was like, ‘Let’s bring back Patty!’”
Alas, “It wasn’t in the cards,” Coiro sighed, “but my hope is that it’s because they have bigger plans for her.”
And just how much would Coiro wager on Madisynn one day resurfacing in the MCU? “Oooh, that’s a tough one…,” she hedged, before deciding with a laugh, “I’d put down a million dollars!”
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