FX's 'X-Men' Take 'Legion' Taps 'Fargo' Favorite to Star
FX has cast the female lead in its X-Men drama take Legion.
Fargo favorite Rachel Keller has been tapped to star in the drama, reuniting with showrunner Noah Hawley, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The Legion pilot introduces the story of David Haller, a man who may be more than human and who has has struggled with mental illness since his teenage years. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he is confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real. In the comics, David is the son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier (aka Professor X) and Israeli Holocaust survivor Gabrielle Haller. The character first appeared in New Mutants #25 in March 1985.
Keller will play the female lead, described as a scrappy and optimistic woman in her 20s. As with most Marvel fare, more specific details about her character are being kept under wraps, including her potential powers, though it's rumored she may be an incarnation of Rogue and Spyke.
The casting comes after Keller's breakout turn as Simone Gerhardt in season two of FX's Fargo. The role was the actress's first leading gig and helped her become a fan favorite.
Legion hails from FX Productions and Marvel Television, with FXP overseeing production. Hawley, who has an overall with FXP, will write the pilot and serve as an executive producer alongside Lauren Shuler Donner (X-Men: Days of Future Past,Wolverine), Bryan Singer (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Superman Returns), Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Martian) and Marvel Television topper Jeph Loeb (Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil) and Jim Chory (Daredevil). John Cameron is also on board as an exec producer, via his overall deal with FXP, marking his and Hawley's latest collaboration after Golden Globe-winning anthology Fargo.
Following news that Rachel Keller would play the female lead in FX's upcoming "Legion" pilot, The Hollywood Reporter has learned that three more actors -- Aubrey Plaza, Dan Stevens and Jean Smart -- will star in the series.
Dan Stevens will star in the series as David Haller, described as "a haunted man, trying to find his way back to sanity, but he's getting tired and is about to give up when he meets the girl of his dreams." Stevens is coming off a lengthy stint as Matthew Crawley on the acclaimed drama "Downton Abbey." In the X-Men comics, Haller's codename is Legion and he's the schizophrenic son of Professor Charles Xavier and UN ambassador Gabrielle Haller.
Aubrey Plaza, most known for her role as April Ludgate on the sitcom "Parks and Recreation," will play Haller's best friend Lenny. Lenny has lived a life of substance abuse, but "knows that any day now her life is going to turn around" thus making her an "impossible optimist" with a "rough demeanor.
The series comes from "Fargo" showrunner Noah Hawley; both Smart and Keller are "Fargo" alums themselves. Jean Smart, who also starred in the sitcom "Designing Women," will play Melanie, a "nurturing, demanding therapist with a sharp mind and unconventional methods." Both Lenny and Melanie appear to be original characters created for the series.
"Legion" is in development at cable network FX, with "Fargo's" Hawley on board as a producer. According to the official description, "Since he was a teenager, David has struggled with mental illness. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he’s confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real." Production on the "Legion" pilot will begin in March.
"Legion" has cast "Fargo" star Rachel Keller in an as-yet-unnamed lead role. Deadline describes Keller's role as "a scrappy, optimistic woman in her 20s," with powers potentially related to the human touch (much like Rogue).
"Legion," featuring Charles Xavier's son David Haller from Marvel Comics lore, is in development at cable network FX, with "Fargo" showrunner Noah Hawley on board as a producer. According to the official description, "Since he was a teenager, David has struggled with mental illness. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he’s confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real."
Keller is best known for her role as Simone Gerhardt on "Fargo," where she plays a femme fatale. She has also appeared in minor roles on "Supernatural" and "The Mentalist."
Both "Legion" and "Hellfire," a series based on longtime X-antagonists The Hellfire Club, are an extension of 20th Century Fox's X-Men film franchise, which started in 2000 with the original "X-Men" movie and continues through this year's "X-Men: Apocalypse" and beyond.
Days after X-Men: Apocalypse bowed in theaters, FX is bringing its own take on the franchise to the small screen.
The cabler has picked up Noah Hawley's X-Men take Legion to series with an eight-episode order, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The drama will debut in early 2017.
Legion introduces the story of David Haller (Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens), a man who may be more than human and who has struggled with mental illness since his teenage years. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he is confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real. In the comics, David is the son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier (aka Professor X) and Israeli Holocaust survivor Gabrielle Haller. The character first appeared in New Mutants No. 25 in March 1985.
Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza will play Lenny, David's friend; Fargo grads Jean Smart and Rachel Keller will take on Melanie, a therapist, and a character rumored to be a mix of Rogue and Spyke, respectively.
“We’ve come to expect excellence from Noah Hawley and with Legion he has delivered another major creative achievement,” said FX original programming president Nick Grad. “Just as he did in reimagining Fargo, he is bringing an entirely new aesthetic and sensibility to the enormously popular and richly represented X-Men world. The pilot episode is stunning, driven by incredible performances from Dan Stevens, Aubrey Plaza, Jean Smart, Rachel Keller and the rest of the cast. We join our producing partners at Marvel in congratulating the creative team for what they’ve accomplished and are as excited as the fans for the premiere of Legion’s first season.”
Legion hails from FX Productions and Marvel Television, with FXP overseeing production. Hawley, who has an overall deal with FXP, penned the pilot and executive produces alongside Lauren Shuler Donner (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Wolverine), Bryan Singer (X-Men: Days of Future Past, Superman Returns), Simon Kinberg (X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Martian) and Marvel Television topper Jeph Loeb (Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil) and Jim Chory (Daredevil). John Cameron also is on board as an exec producer, via his overall deal with FXP, marking his and Hawley's latest collaboration after Golden Globe-winning anthology Fargo.
The news comes some seven months after FX ordered Legion to pilot and after X-Men: Apocalypse had a disappointing bow over the weekend at the box office (a soft $80 million).
Legion extends Marvel's small-screen empire. The comic book powerhouse also has ABC's Agents of SHIELD and multiple series at Netflix, including Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders and the Punisher spinoff. While ABC passed on a third season of Agent Carter and SHIELD spinoff Marvel's Most Wanted, Fox is still readying Hellfire.
FX becomes the latest network to turn to comics. AMC hit ratings gold with The Walking Dead, and The CW has found success with its DC Comics slate that now includes Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow. Fox, for its part, also has Batman prequel Gotham, and NBC has DC Comics' first comedy entry, Powerless, due midseason.
For Hawley, Legion joins FX's critical darling Fargo on its schedule and a drama lineup that also features American Horror Story, American Crime Story, The Americans, The Strain, Tyrant and the upcoming Ryan Murphy anthology Feud. On the pilot side, FX's lone drama awaiting word is John Singleton's redeveloped Snowfall.
'Legion' Premiere Previewed at NYCC: A Look Inside FX's Upcoming 'X-Men' Series
Dan Stevens is a long way from Downton Abbey, even if he's still inhabiting a television fortress of sorts.
The erstwhile Matthew Crawley is the star of a very different kind of show in FX's upcoming Legion, based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. The show, masterminded by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, follows a man named David Haller (Stevens), who suffers from schizophrenia — and also happens to be an incredibly powerful mutant, whose remarkable abilities are only just beginning to manifest.
Legion, premiering early next year, was front and center during the show's New York Comic Con panel at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Sunday (Oct. 9), featuring several individuals involved with the show: cast members Bill Irwin, Katie Astleton, Amber Midthunder, Jeremie Harris, Aubry Plaza, Rachel Keller, and Dan Stevens; as well as Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb, longtime X-Men producer Lauren Shuler Donner, and creator Noah Hawley.
Before the panelists spoke, audience members were treated to a surprise screening of the first half of the series premiere. As with Fargo, Hawley's Legion plays out in non-linear fashion, hopping between different points in time — forward, backwards, and perhaps into other temporal arenas as well. Ingredients scattered throughout the episode include a chocolate cupcake with forbidden frosting, licorice ropes, discussion of a nightmarish creature called "The Devil with Yellow Eyes," swift romances, heartfelt kisses in window reflections, a potential murder mystery, and an impressive one-take through a very dangerous facility that escalates the show from psychological drama to full-blown X-Men series.
Once the footage ended, and panelists were invited to speak, the conversation was... tight-lipped, to put it mildly. The cast members were very coy and carefully worded about discussing the show's specifics, doing their best to keep as much close to the vest as possible. Rather than talking too much about character details and story points, the panelists instead discussed their inspiration for the show, and the core themes they're hoping to explore.
"X-Men was my book when I was growing up," Hawley said of his inspiration for the show, who heard about Legion after completing the first season of Fargo. At first, he was reluctant. "I had to feel like I understood what the show was. It had to be a strong character journey. I almost started without a character mind, thinking in general terms about what would be fun in this space, and found my way to David's character — a man who was either schizophrenic or had these powers and doesn't know what's real. In the show, you're in his head, so you don't necessarily know what's real, either."
"This is far from the X-Men movies, but still lives in that universe," added Donner. "The only way for X-Men to keep moving forward is to be original and to surprise. And this is a surprise. It is very, very different."
Loeb spoke to the core message of Legion, and how it reflects the longstanding X-Men tradition of outsiders exploring their uniqueness: "The core of every book is that the X-Men were different. Each of us, at some moment in our lives, and maybe even this moment, feel different. We live in a world right now where diversity and uniqueness and whether or not we fit in is something that's on our minds twenty-four hours a day. The X-Men have never been more relevant than they are right now. To have a voice like Noah and FX and this extraordinary cast... you're in for the most wonderful surprise ride that will make you laugh and make you cry and also at the same time make you hope that we're entering at a time where people are not going to turn you away because you're different, but will embrace you. That's our hope."
Stevens spoke about what drew him into Legion, starting with the talent involved, Hawley especially. Once he started diving into the comics and exploring the scope of Legion as a character and story, he felt it was apart from anything else as an acting exercise. "It's been a trip already," he said.
Plaza talked about her character Lenny, who would not consider herself anyone's sidekick. "I think they're friends," she deadpanned about Lenny's relationship with David. In the pilot, Lenny is seen listening to mysterious music on headphones — and the contents of that music might be pretty important, as Plaza would not reveal what it is she's listening to.
Bill Irwin plays a character who is not in the premiere — at least not in what was shown during the panel. Hawley said he specifically sought out Irwin, because of his playful approach to characters.
"What was important about getting Bill in the show to me was... we wanted to play," he said. "There's a spirit of play and inventiveness. People are at their most creative when they play. That's why children are so open and honest and real. I was drawn to the genre because of the pure creative wonder you can find, and that was my hope to bring to the show."
Hawley added about his vision of the show, and how he hopes it speaks to the current cultural landscape: "We live in a tumultuous time. Things are polarizing. There's a lot of intolerance. A lot of that starts inside us. The great thing about exploring this character is before he has an opinion about anyone else, he has to figure out his own shit. That's what we all have to do. This journey isn't necessarily racing toward a battle with an entity, so much as embracing the battle within."
Asked for clarity on where Legion fits within the X-Men film universe, Hawley said, "There's a certain degree to where that's to be determined. We're in David's subjective reality, so it's hard to tell. One thing that's attractive about X-Men is there are alternate timelines and universes. We start to realize we're seeing this world through multiple layers and mixed signals that Dan's character is getting. It would be a spoiler in a true sense to say [too much]. ... I'll say that we are true to the origins of this character, and just leave it at that."
"You can't tell this story without that element," Hawley later added when asked if Professor Xavier, Legion's father in the comics, would be acknowledged on the show. "I mean, there's a wheelchair in the first scene..."
As Marvel TV's head, Loeb said that his presence at the panel should be taken as a sign that "bridges are being made" between the Fox-owned Marvel characters and Marvel Studios, "but I don't want to make any promises that I'll have to explain the next time someone asks me."
"But it boils down to this," he continued. "Marvel heroes at their core are people who are damaged and are trying to figure out who they are in life. It doesn't matter whether or not they're X-Men, Tony Stark, Matt Murdock or Peter Parker. That's where it starts. We're much more interested in the person inside the mask than the mask. If you start at a place as strong as David's character is and you have a storyteller like Noah, then it's Marvel. In that way, it is all connected."
"What I enjoyed with Fargo is that for the first three hours it seemed unconnected from the movie, because it had to stand on its own feet," Hawley added. "I feel the same way about this show. We have to earn the right to be part of this universe. My hope is we create something so strong that the people in the movie studio call and say they would be foolish enough not to connect these things. But all I can do is control the show and make the best version possible."
FX's 'Legion' Is the Kind of Show "Marvel Has Never Done Before"
FX's X-Men drama Legion is going to change the way fanboys look at comic book TV shows.
Producers, including showrunner Noah Hawley, and Marvel head of television Jeph Loeb told reporters Thursday at the Television Critics Association's winter press tour that the FX drama starring Dan Stevens, Rachel Keller and Aubrey Plaza will not be similar to the kind of comic book TV universes seen on the small screen.
Legion introduces the story of David Haller (Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens), a man who may be more than human and who has struggled with mental illness since his teenage years. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he is confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real.
Asked specifically if Marvel's Legion is setting up a universe similar to what The CW has done with DC Comics' The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow as well as Marvel's own Netflix roster of heroes in The Defenders — Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Daredevil and Luke Cage — Loeb, Marvel's head of TV, said that wasn't the case.
"Legion redefines the genre in a new way. We get asked a lot: 'Are there too many superhero shows? Have we reached the saturation point?' We have two responses to that: 'Do we ask those about cop, medical and legal shows? No.' Secondly, the other idea is Marvel doesn't start out from a place [where] a person is defined by their powers. This is about what's happening to David in that world."
In the comics, David is the son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier (aka Professor X) and Israeli Holocaust survivor Gabrielle Haller. The character first appeared in New Mutants No. 25 in March 1985.
"You can really bend the rules," Loeb said of the X-Men universe, stressing the "quiet issues" of the comics and Marvel's lesser-known hero. "Noah came in and asked about mental health and exploring the perception of people. [These are] stories of people in the real world. We don't know that anyone is going to come to this show because they like The Defenders. We think they'll come because of Noah, the cast and FX merged together for a kind of show Marvel has never done before."
Hawley, the mastermind behind FX's awards and critical darling Fargo anthology, was interested in exploring the world that exists if you remove the superhero genre.
"The first thought I had in looking at the genre is if we remove the genre, is there a compelling show you want to watch there? The underlying show, no matter the genre, has to be a compelling character story," he said, singling out the relationship between David and co-star Rachel Keller's character (whose "power" is the inability to touch people). "Finding David's storyline and introducing Rachel's storyline and this idea of this epic love story and then putting the genre back into it and saying, 'If we have a character who isn't sure what's real, could we make a show that's subjective?'"
Hawley stressed that the characters' powers are metaphorical to what their issues are. So Keller's character, because she can't touch anyone, is diagnosed with an antisocial anxiety disorder. "It's where things manifest," he said.
As for Hawley's approach to adapting in the Marvel universe, the showrunner said he felt it was more interesting to explore the subjective than to simply adapt issues of the comics.
"I felt what was more interesting was to take the concept of this character on some level and use his subjective reality to create something that is more of a fable or parable on some level in order to create something unexpected," he said. "I'm a fan of all the comics and stories … and thought the story I wanted to tell would be great using this template."
Legion premieres Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 10 p.m. on FX.
Bryan Singer, Aubrey Plaza Talk "Psychedelic Genius" at Premiere of FX's 'Legion'
There’s no easy way to describe Legion, FX’s new X-Men TV series from the brain of Fargo creator Noah Hawley.
“It's an onion,” executive producer and X-Men movie director Bryan Singer told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet at the show’s premiere. “That's the best way to describe it — It's a visual feast, it's beautifully written, but it's an onion — constantly being unpeeled with every scene and with every episode. It's constantly evolving. Just when you think it's going in one direction, it takes you in a completely different one.”
Star Aubrey Plaza chimed in, “I would say it's a superhero origin story told through the lens of some cosmic psychedelic genius that is telling the story in a non-linear, magical way."
“It's a very complex web of character relationships," said Bill Irwin, who plays Cary Loudermilk on the series. "The whole question of superpowers in [writer] Noah [Hawley]'s hands is just a different proposition than anybody else's. Time is relative; powers are relative; good and evil are not relative, but it's hard to know who's on what side at any point."
But star Amber Midthunder might be the most successful in describing the series: “It centers around a guy named David Haller. He grew up thinking he was schizophrenic, and then suddenly he's faced with the idea that maybe the voices he hears and the things that he sees are real, and he has a team of people helping him do that,” she explained.
FX debuted the high-profile show at the Pacific Design Center’s Silver Screen Theater on Thursday night, with the majority of the cast and producers in attendance (along with fellow FX stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Allison Tolman, and Glenn Howerton from Fargo and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).
Dan Stevens, who plays the lead, David, on the show, spoke to THR about getting into the mind of his character. “I guess it depends on your definition of insane, and that's one of the big questions that sort of hovers over all of it. The show is mad and I felt pretty insane playing him if that's any concert, but I don't think it's as clear cut as saying David Haller is insane. But to a lot of people he seems pretty crazy.”
Marvel Television boss Jeph Loeb told THR that he does want Legion to feel like the comics, but you won’t see anything on the show that you’ve seen on the page. “I certainly don't want to tell stories that are in the comics because it's both disrespectful to the original comics and it's disrespectful to the television audience. If they know how it's going to begin and end, they can read the comic. Why watch the show? It doesn't matter whether it's Daredevil or Jessica Jones or Agents of Shield, we'd like to be able to present new stories that use our characters in the same kind of way that [the comics do]."
After the screening of the hour-plus-long premiere, guests drove and Ubered their way to Nightingale Plaza on La Cienega Boulevard where they sipped the SBE nightclub’s signature cocktails, dined on filet mignon and roasted chicken, and danced to Beyonce.
Earlier in the evening, both Hawley and Loeb spoke to THR about whether there could be a second season of the well-reviewed show. (In fact, FX boss John Landgraf introduced the screening by reading several of Legion’s positive write-ups, THR’s review included.)
“I think the goal is to do more, but it was important to me that this story have a beginning, middle, and end,” Hawley said. “If you know where you're going then you're laying in all the pieces that get you there.”
Loeb said there are definitely ways to expand the Legion world. “Well, there are eight episodes, let's see how people like that before we figure out where else this is going to go. I can tell you that there's certainly ways that things can expand, and there are ways not to. I've said it many times, we're not in the business of running an Easter Egg farm but if there's a nod or a wink to let everybody know we know where we are, we know when we are, then our fans will follow us. Isn't it about time we did an X-Men television show, and isn't it about time we did it well? And that's what Legion is.”
Legion premieres Wednesday, Feb. 8 at 10 p.m. on FX.
'Legion': How Noah Hawley is Building His Own Corner of the Marvel Universe
Matt Murdock doesn't punch a single face without Marvel's express approval. Phil Coulson and his SHIELD subordinates get their marching orders directly from the House of Ideas. But when it comes to David Haller, the very concept of control is a nebulous one at best.
David is the hero at the heart of Legion, the upcoming X-Men TV series that marks the first collaboration between FX and Marvel TV. It takes its cues from the Marvel Comics character of the same name — a rather obscure character, about as far away from a household name as it gets. As he's represented in the new series, David suffers from mental illness, hospitalized for schizophrenia. But what if his mental illness isn't what it seems, and is instead the misdiagnosed manifestation of his incredible telepathic powers? It's a common X-Men story arc, applied here to a figure with dangerously powerful abilities and a greatly limited capacity to control them, and all tied together by creator Noah Hawley, the mastermind of FX's Fargo. Much like that anthology series, Legion comes with its own undeniably distinct look and feel.
"It's always important to me to try to make something unexpected and unpredictable, not because I want to confound or confuse people, but because I think there's a joy to watching a story where you don't know what's going to happen next," Hawley tells The Hollywood Reporter about his inspiration for the new series. "In Fargo, we're able to play with that because those stories are built around a large number of moving pieces on a collision course, and you can't really tell which ones are going to collide and when. There's a certain element of randomness to it as well. In that way, I wanted to tell a story that was surprising but felt inevitable in the end."
"Here, one of the things I always loved about this genre and genres like it — science fiction and fantasy — is that there is a sense of wonder to it and creativity and pure imagination," he continues. "You look at things like The Twilight Zone or Doctor Who or Doctor Strange. These sorts of very concept-driven genres. I really loved that idea. I didn't want to make something earnest about the inevitable battle between good and evil. What I liked about this character of David Haller is exploring, what if someone who has been diagnosed with a mental illness may not be mentally ill? There's this inherent disconnect between perception and reality. I was excited to make something subjective, something where the audience… the best way to understand David was to be David and understand that he sees things and doesn't know if they're real or not. So we also see things and we don't know whether they're real or not. He doesn't understand what they mean, but he's trying. That's our journey as well."
Although the journey of Legion sees David slowly discovering his gifts and understanding the true scope of his reality, Hawley says it does not negate the pain and suffering David's endured throughout his life. He points to an early sequence from the pilot episode, a three and a half minute montage that shows David's progression from infancy to adulthood.
"You see how he was once a child with nothing but promise," says Hawley. "Then there's a moment where for some kids, the illness would be kicking in. In his case, maybe his powers kicked in here and he began to disconnect from the world at large, and it became a more negative story for him and he ended up in an institution. There's something tragic about that. I didn't want to end up using a serious subject as a kind of color for a genre story. I thought that what would make this show work as a dramatic show would be that it was a serious show about serious things at the same time that it's a playful genre show."
In that regard, the series very much plays with the conventions of the superhero genre. Legion features mutants with powers as mesmerizing as the ability to travel through another person's memories, not to mention the visual manifestation of David's own destructive potential.
"I always feel that what works best in these genres is if there's a thematic or metaphorical quality to the powers," says Hawley. "In other words, if you look at a character in the X-Men world, these characters are often outsiders who have been treated as other and their behavior stigmatized. They end up with a very sort of negative view of themselves because that's how the world sees them. They then have to take control of their own identity and redefine themselves and say these things you're telling me are my weaknesses are actually my strengths and what makes me special."
As an example of this philosophy, Hawley points to one of the main characters in the series: Syd Barrett, played by Fargo season two standout Rachel Keller, whose mysterious abilities are tied into some of the most vulnerable aspects of her personality.
"She can't be touched or touch people, because things happen when she's touched," says Hawley. "She's been diagnosed as having an antisocial personality disorder, and on one level, that's not it at all, because she has this physical ability. But on another level, having this physical ability has made her antisocial, just by definition. She can't be touched and she doesn't like to get close to people. These two ideas are true at the same time, which is interesting to me. Her power and her character flaw are the same. By exploring her powers, you can explore her character. I think that's what was most exciting to me about taking this project on, its ability to use the genre to reveal the characters."
Beyond serving as a great example of Hawley's outlook on how superpowers must reflect themes of the story, Syd represents another essential element to the way Legion unfolds: a sense for David and viewers alike that in the midst of such an ambiguous world, at least one thing is real.
"I wanted to give him something real to hold onto, and give us something real, so he meets this girl," Hawley says of David and Syd's relationship. "I think for audiences, whenever there's a love story, everything else is negotiable. If we like them and we're rooting for them, we want her to be real. As long as she's real, everything else is negotiable. I thought that would buy me some time with the audience, because my goal is not to confuse or obfuscate. My goal is to present reality as he sees it, and then try to decode it as he's decoding it, so that by the end of chapter one, the first season, you're going to have a much clearer sense of what's real than you had in the beginning, because he does too."
If it all sounds a little more cerebral and a little less Cerebro than one would commonly expect from a live-action adventure set within the X-Men universe, that's by design. Early on, Hawley was definitely uncertain how his vision for Legion would go over with those responsible for the carefully manicured Marvel brand.
"I joked early on that I would hop on a notes call with Marvel on this particular crazy story that I was trying to tell, and that their notes would just be 30 minutes of them going, 'Uh…,'" he says with a laugh. "But it wasn't! They're very articulate. There's a rollout on the movie front and on the TV front for them of a lot of interconnected stories and characters, like launching Daredevil first and then Jessica Jones and ultimately leading to The Defenders. But this was a gimme. This was not something they generated. It's not something that fits in anywhere else in their shared universe. And as a result, they could have gone one of two ways. They could have said you have to conform this to what we're doing everywhere else, or they could say, we don't really know what to make of it other than it feels like a fully realized world and it feels like there's a vision here, and it doesn't impinge on our other work to have this be a standalone project. They went the second way."
Hawley adds that Marvel maintains active involvement with the show in order "to protect the underlying IP and make sure that the characters people know and love are the characters people know and love, and you're not just borrowing a name and creating a different person that the fans can't relate to." But he also feels that the nature of the show and the relative obscurity of the main character affords him a tremendous amount of creative leeway.
"I approached it more the way I approach Fargo, which is to say, with incredible respect for the underlying material but wanting to tell the story that I want to tell, and to the degree that that intersects in some ways with the stories that the readers know already," says Hawley. "That can be satisfying, but I also feel like it can be a trap, to be telling them stories they love that inevitably are going to change in the telling and therefore create a disconnect between the stories they love and the story they're watching. My feeling was, let me take a character who seems familiar and let's tell a new story, which will create something unpredictable, because you don't know what happened in the comics, and also to potentially allow you to see this character in a new way."
Assuming it catches on with viewers, there will be plenty of opportunities for Legion to depict new sides of the Marvel Universe in the years ahead. Hawley says the show is envisioned as a series with multiple seasons, with many of the story points already mapped out in advance.
"It was always designed as a series, not a limited or a miniseries or an anthology like Fargo," he confirms. "But even within that, it's always very important to me to know where the story's going when I'm starting, because the best stories I feel are the ones where there's foreshadowing and you're laying in clues and you're creating something that's just as exciting to watch the second time, because now that the plot is out of the way and you know what happens, you can see all the ways in which we laid in ideas that are only really clear once you know what the whole story's about."
Of course, Legion only reaches that point if an audience comes along for the ride. On that front, Hawley has no predictions.
"I have no real ability to judge," he says. "It seems like such a specific show, that it's hard for me to judge. Is it something that people want? Do a lot of people want it? Do a few people want it? But my hope was that if I made something that interested me, and if I did it with enough confidence and enough playfulness, then maybe the world might respond."
This was a mess.No idea what was going on.Still,any show that begins with "Happy Jack" on the soundtrack and also plays "She's a Rainbow" can't all bad.
_________________ What will be will be even if it never happens.
'Legion': Inside the Premiere's Biggest X-Men Moment
[Warning: this story contains spoilers for the first episode of FX's Legion.]
If not for the Marvel branding before the action begins, it would be easy to forget where FX's Legion comes from. It's based on the X-Men comic book character of the same name, albeit a very obscure one. The pilot episode leans on that obscurity, focusing more on David Hawley (Dan Stevens) and the surreal world he sees as a result of his mental illness. Or is it mental illness? It's through that question that the premiere rounds a corner, revealing David's surroundings as a top secret government facility filled with people who know that David's a mutant — perhaps the most powerful mutant of them all, in fact.
"There's this sense of always out of the frying pan and into the fire," creator Noah Hawley tells The Hollywood Reporter about how Legion grows over the course of its freshman season. "There was a sense, architecturally, with that first hour, that just when you thought you knew where you were, you walked out of a door and you think you're in a police interview room, but then you walk out the door and it's a set that's built at the bottom of an empty swimming pool."
The pool doesn't stay empty for long. David's interrogators strand him in the middle of the pool, now brimming with water, threatening electrified torture if he doesn't start cooperating. From there, the already visually stunning but incredibly cerebral episode takes a hard turn for the superheroic, as David's girlfriend Syd (Rachel Keller) and other mutants appear at the facility and orchestrate an elaborate prison break.
"I suppose it's the payoff that people are waiting for, isn't it," Stevens says of the episode's action-packed climax. "At first, you're going, OK, this is a superhero show, but where are the explosions? Nobody's died yet! What's going on? And then it suddenly goes full action, very very quickly."
Indeed it does, as Legion embarks on an uninterrupted one-take action scene, following David and friends as they use their myriad mutant powers to dismantle the facility's heavily armed operatives. The scene required multiple days of shooting, and a lot of stopping and starting, according to Keller.
"We stopped for the clouds a lot," she remembers. "Everybody was standing up looking at the clouds. When you're doing a shot continuously, you have to have no clouds there every single time you do it. So if a cloud came by, we had to wait."
Too bad Ororo Munroe wasn't on hand to weather any storms. For his part, the biggest hardship Stevens faced didn't involve what was in the sky, but what was on the ground — namely, his feet.
"I had the misfortune of coming out of a swimming pool, so I had to be barefoot," he says. "They gave me what they thought would help. You know those horrible toe sneakers? They dug out a pair, and they were flesh-colored, kind of. They were incredibly uncomfortable. Everyone else is just in regular footwear, and I was pretty much barefoot. It got quite painful after a while!"
Even Keller remembers Stevens' footwear quite well: "They were like little Hobbit shoes."
As for how the sequence evolved from the page to the screen, Hawley, who directed the episode, explains that "in the original script, it was not a very detailed thing. As I was prepping the pilot, it grew and grew into this enormous single take shot of this escape and the action going on. It's one of those measure twice, cut once deals. That's all we were doing that day. We would rehearse it and rehearse it. We mapped out exactly what we were going to be seeing, because there were a lot of visual effects elements to it. Then it was a question of trying to run it through and have the explosions go off exactly where they're supposed to, and everybody's hitting their marks and doing their things and it was really thrilling."
"It was chaos, for all departments, really: cameras, stunts, ourselves as actors. It was fantastic," says Stevens. "There was something very comic booky about the absurdity of it as well. There was something thrilling about how big it suddenly got, from being this very cerebral inner space exploration, and this interrogation, and then we get into dancing, and then we're in full bore Saving Private Ryan mode."
"The pilot as a directorial experience for me really allowed me to check a lot of things off the list," adds Hawley. "It was really fun."
So, where do things go from here? On a literal level, the next act of Legion involves fulfilling the promise of the pilot's final scene, in which David comes into contact with the mysterious Melanie Bird, played by Jean Smart, who worked with both Hawley and Keller previously on Fargo season two.
"Melanie runs a different kind of facility than Clockworks," says Keller. "We have these two opposing views: one place that wants to subdue what is special and unique about someone, and another that wants to help express and learn and experiment with what's special and unique."
Beyond the question of what's next, there's the question of how the subsequent action will play out on screen. The first episode's structure was meant to build in increasingly inventive and surprising ways, and Keller says the remaining episodes will be no different.
"I think what I'm most excited about is how different each of the episodes are," she says. "When I watched the pilot, and then watched episodes two and three, it almost felt like a different show each time. I think we're given such a great lens through the X-Men genre, but we're also playing with film noir and thrillers and romantic comedy. It's a very director-driven show. It's almost like the episode prior doesn't set you up for how the next episode is going to go. It will connect. It will. But you have to experience it. You have to go on the ride and let the episode wash over you again. I think that's the magic of it."
"Particularly in that first chapter, that's kind of the point," Stevens adds, weighing in on the pilot's disorienting nature. "We want to rattle your perceptions a little bit in order to welcome you into the show. I think most shows in their pilot hour are setting up a store, and it's like, this is what we have on display here. This is the kind of thing you might get. That's the aim of a pilot at every stage, right? This is the kind of show we want to make, this is the tone it's going to have, this is the kind of humor you might expect, these are the weird things you can expect. With our show, those things just so happen to be extra weird."
Extra weird indeed — or, given the show's roots, perhaps that should be X-tra weird. Sorry, we'll show ourselves out.
I liked it. Disorienting for sure, but I think that fits with the mental illness aspect. I barely remember the character from New Mutants, but I seem to recall Sienkiewicz's art being pretty abstract, so that works too. Pretty good performances by the cast, so I'm willing to give it a shot.
Besides that hour and change was more interesting than the last year or so of Agents of SHIELD.
This was a mess.No idea what was going on.Still,any show that begins with "Happy Jack" on the soundtrack and also plays "She's a Rainbow" can't all bad.
That does sound like an awesome soundtrack. Clearly the showrunners understand which decade had great pop music, unlike the "Guardians of the Galaxy" franchise.
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