Wonder Man: Marvel’s Love Letter to Shakespeare

A note from the Editor: This post marks the 100th blog post that Austin Tichenor has written for Shakespeare & Beyond, and true to form, it combines all the things that we’ve come to expect and enjoy from him: a deep knowledge of Shakespeare, great appreciation for the theater, and a true love of pop culture. We’re grateful to Austin for his many insights over the years and look forward to many more.

My new favorite superhero origin story is this: Peter Parker may have become Spiderman after he was bitten by a radioactive spider, but Simon Williams became Wonder Man after he was also bitten by a bug—the acting bug!—in a school production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. 

Shakespeare as the creator of heroes is explored in Wonder Man, the  charming and character-driven new entry in the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) that’s much more interested in the power of theater and storytelling than it is in super-powered beings fighting evil. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Simon Williams, a struggling actor in Los Angeles who desperately wants to play his favorite superhero in a new movie about Wonder Man but can’t get out of his own way because his insecurities are even greater than his talent. He can’t live in the moment, overthinks everything, and is an annoying, question-asking, improvement-suggesting, time-waster that nobody wants to work with. Like Superman carrying kryptonite around with him, Simon is his own worst enemy.

Fortunately, he encounters Trevor Slattery, a notorious actor seeking a comeback and played by the Academy Award-winning (and noted Shakespearean) Sir Ben Kingsley. In the MCU, Trevor is infamous for having been hired to portray a terrorist in Iron Man 3 (2013) and then being freed from prison by the Mandarin, the criminal mastermind he impersonated, in the 14-minute sequel film All Hail the King (2014), which opens with an epigraph from King Lear: “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Trevor returns in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), in which he’s introduced reciting the lines from Macbeth that so impressed his terrorist captors that they kept him around “like a jester” instead of executing him.

The two actors meet at an afternoon showing of John Schlesinger’s 1969 film Midnight Cowboy— another tale of an odd couple on the fringes of the American Dream—and Trevor becomes Simon’s mentor, launching into a series of acting lessons gleaned from Shakespeare as they both try to land roles in the new Wonder Man movie. First, he brags about seeing Schlesinger’s actual 1965 production of Timon of Athens at the Royal Shakespeare Company—the RSC’s first production of that play—in which Timon is conceived (according to the show’s program) as a man whose “fantasy life suppresses his real nature, his isolation, and inability to make any genuine human contact.” Simon also isolates himself to hide his real nature—a strange unexplained energy that erupts when he gets frustrated or upset—so he digs into the backstory and psychology of all his characters, no matter how minor, to shield himself against becoming too emotionally involved in a role and triggering his superpower.

Not knowing anything about Simon’s secret, Trevor poo-poos his overly intellectual approach to acting, saying, “Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way. It’s too difficult to comprehend them. So let’s get past them. Let’s find a human underneath.” He quotes King Lear (“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools”) and confesses he too struggled with characters until he “remembered that great speech from Hamlet: ‘‘The purpose of playing is to hold, as twere, the mirror up to nature.’ Never forget that. Nature. That’s our job.” It’s advice Trevor returns to in almost every episode. Trevor offers Simon tips on controlling his breathing both onstage and off, and as Simon’s acting improves, so does his ability to control the mysterious energy he was born with.

Wonder Man

Trevor’s influence on Simon reflects Kingsley’s formative impact on the entire series. Wonder Man was co-created by Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed and co-wrote Shang-Chi, and Andrew Guest, a veteran of both the MCU series Hawkeye and such sitcoms as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Community, and 30 Rock, and together they’ve written a show that’s more of a buddy comedy about show business than a typical show about superheroes fighting injustice. “Sir Ben, you may not be surprised to learn, has a lot to say about acting in general and why it’s special to him,” Guest revealed in an interview. “As those conversations went on, I was like, ‘I want to put that line in the show, I want to put that line in the show.’” Abdul-Mateen is also no stranger to Shakespeare or superheroes: In addition to acting in productions of Twelfth Night in California and King Lear at the Delacorte in New York’s Central Park, he played Black Manta in Aquaman and Dr. Manhattan in the HBO miniseries Watchmen. Behind the scenes, both actors “helped to inform this world and these characters,” according to Guest, and their theater backgrounds inform this love letter to performing. Because “it goes so deep into the craft of acting,” one online reviewer said, Wonder Man is “a series made for theater kids.”

In ways large and small, Wonder Man suggests that William Shakespeare—and by implication, artists generally—also have amazing powers and are in their own ways heroic. “So shines a good deed in a naughty world,” Trevor observes, quoting The Merchant of Venice. “Acting isn’t a job. It’s a calling,” Trevor tells a famous character actor, “it’s the single most consequential thing anyone could ever do with their life” (which, in a world where superheroes are real, is really saying something). When Trevor reminds us, “When we share our pain, our grief, our joy, the audience is less alone in theirs,” we remember that art is its own form of resistance.

There are those who complain that Wonder Man doesn’t sufficiently explain the origin of the energy that gives Simon super strength. But the series is more interested in Simon’s other superpower—his acting talent. There are indeed many inexplicable elements in Wonder Man (not the least of which is how two actors are able to drive from Hollywood to Malibu to film an audition—and then drive back—in a single afternoon ). But in the MCU, humans born with innate and inexplicable powers are called “mutants,” a word that would seem to apply to both superheroes and Shakespeare. “What will we find when we look at Wonder Man today?” Von Kovak, the Oscar-winning director of Wonder Man’s movie-within-the-series asks. “What can Wonder Man teach us about ourselves?” These are the same questions we ask about Shakespeare, and Wonder Man explores the answers in a wonderfully comic and heartfelt fashion.