The She-Hulk Episode 1 Scene That Was Really Special To Tatiana Maslany
With the release of the newest series from Disney+ and Marvel Studios, "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law," fans are getting a look at what Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) and her Hulk persona will look like in the post #MeToo era. The new series changes up She-Hulk's origin story a bit, which isn't unexpected. Instead of requiring a blood transfusion after being shot by a mob boss like in the comics, Episode 1 shows her driving with her cousin, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), when the sudden appearance of a Sakarrian ship causes her to swerve and flip the car. After a small amount of Bruce's blood drips into Jennifer's open wound, she becomes She-Hulk.
While Bruce thinks it'll take years for Jennifer to learn to control and live with being a Hulk, Jennifer immediately proves him wrong after telling him that the things that trigger the Hulk — anger and fear — "are the baseline of any woman just existing." In a nutshell, being a woman helps her regulate her emotions better than Bruce, and a later conversation with him about how being a woman gives her the ability to retain her consciousness more easily resonated with Maslany.
Tatiana Maslany loved the scene where Jennifer explains how she's still herself as She-Hulk
When Jennifer gently but powerfully informs Bruce that, like most women, she's learned all her life how essential it is to control her emotions, her words were felt strongly by women everywhere, including Tatiana Maslany. "That scene is one of the easiest scenes I've ever gotten to play because the truth of what she's saying is so resonant to me," she told Decider. "[Head writer] Jessica [Gao] wrote that scene obviously from a very experienced place, a deep place. And she did it with so much humor and a light touch. It really is just speaking the truth that I think so many of us have experienced."
Jennifer also breaks it down further for Bruce in Episode 1. "When I'm catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day because if I don't, I will get called emotional, or difficult, or might just literally get murdered," she says about the need to control her rage.
Maslany further explained to Decider that the scene was "one of the moments in the show that I'm, like, this is so special to see this in this larger superhero story. So much of this allegory of superheroes is always rooted in these smaller human moments, and so to get to really speak to that was very cool."