As fans gear up for tomorrow's hotly-awaited series premiere of What If... ?, we recently caught up with director Bryan Andrews and writer A.C. Bradley to get some much-needed intel on arguably the most inventive and wholly original Marvel Studios production yet.
During the global press conference a few weeks ago, star Jeffrey Wright and director Bryan Andrews shared an emotional and moving response to working with and knowing the late Chadwick Boseman. Speaking with Andrews during the press junket, he elaborated on his time working with the Black Panther star as well as coordinating recording schedules with over fifty returning cast members from the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe.
"We got a certain amount of voices in before the pandemic, which was great, then there's certain ones that maybe had to follow up later, because the pandemic happens, so Chadwick pops up a few times in the series, not always playing Star-Lord T’Challa, but other Black Panther things here and there, so his initial Star-Lord performance, that was all pretty much in a booth, in person. That was awesome.
Then, the remainder is small little bits and pickups that we had to do for some of these other things that was done remotely. For some of the people, we got them in somewhat early, but it’s the schedules of everyone. It’s crazy, some people we don’t get till way later and some things are actually being animated and they’re like, “Hold off on those scenes,” because they don’t know the dialogue yet, they had to wait because it’s tough, people are busy."
Considering many of the actors returning for the series have played their respective roles for the better part of the last decade, we were curious to learn more about whether they were given any creative input in how the variants of their original characters would talk or behave.
Bradley confirms that while they did mostly stick to A.C. Bradley's amazing scripts, they also had some room to play around a little with the characterizations and make their new roles as magical as possible.
"It was awesome getting them all back, or as many as we could, they’re busy, some maybe can’t, schedules didn’t align, but we got a lot back and I think they were all pretty happy and excited to be apart of it, to play the different versions of their character and the scripts are fantastic, and they give us everything we need within certain scenes and certain moments, there’s moments that would pop up where it’s like, “Oh, we can riff a little,” and those were always magical to find and allowing the talent to be like, “Ooh ooh, what if I did it this way?”
Yeah, let’s go, let’s play, because as long as the spirit of the story, the spirit of what we’re trying to get across is there, they might find a way that’s more specific to them or to their character to say a particular thing and bring a little extra sauce to it and that’s always exciting to find. Those extra little things, keeps elevating everything, it’s just fun, so yeah, we got to play a little bit too and I had a lot of fun doing that. It was great."
As for the unique animation style itself, Andrews tells us how he was drawn to the work of American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker for inspiration and used his illustrations as the basis for what we see on the show. He wanted to create an authentic look for the series that, even animated, would feel very MCU, or at least, MCU-adjacent.
"For me, the inspiration came from J. C. Leyendecker, an American illustrator from the 1920s, 1930s, he did a lot of ads and covers for The Saturday Evening Post before. He was a hero of Norman Rockwell, who everyone’s really familiar with, J. C. Leyendecker was his hero and he worshipped him and wanted to do what he did. He was eventually able to get that same job eventually.
Anyways, he had a way of idealizing the human form in a way that felt heroic and iconic and it felt like a nice adjacent look to live-action where it feels removed, but the animation is not so pushed and so stylized or so graphic that it feels like it’s not even remotely attached to the cinematic universe as we know it.
Since these are just riffs on the cinematic universe, I wanted something that felt akin or close and going with an illustrated inspiration seemed better to me in that moment that going with pure comic book, even though I love to have it look like straight up Kirby, maybe if we get to one day do something like that. For this, it felt like this style was appropriate, to let it have its own life and not be like, “Oh, that’s that comic book style I know and have seen.” It gives it its own uniqueness, which I think was important."