Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, streaming, TV | Tagged: Alaqua Cox, daredevil, daredevil: born again, Echo, Marion Dayre, marvel spotlight, Marvel Studios, vincent d'onofrio

Echo EP Marion Dayre on "Daredevil," "Better Call Saul" Influences

Echo EP Marion Dayre on how her time on Better Call Saul and watching Daredevil prepped her for Marvel Studios' MCU crime drama.

To build the credibility of the crime-drama in Marvel Studios' Echo, the series recruited Better Call Saul writer Marion Dayre as writer-producer to tell Maya Lopez's (Alaqua Cox's) story of redemption in her Oklahoma hometown while facing the inevitable reprisal from her mentor Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio), aka The Kingpin as Disney+'s first TV-MA series under the Marvel Spotlight banner. Maya was the former enforcer for the Tracksuit Mafia in the holiday limited series Hawkeye as she sought her father's killer in Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), who adopted his Ronin persona during the Blip as a one-man army against organized crime to cope with his family's disappearance. At the series conclusion, Maya sees Kingpin's true nature before shooting him in the head, but revealed to still be alive in the premiere episode of Echo. Dayre opened up about how she prepped for the series using her expertise from her time on the Breaking Bad spinoff and studying a supercut of D'Onofrio's character from the Netflix Defenders shows.

When it came to Dayre's recruitment, "[Marvel] reached out to me, and they asked me to come in for a meeting. I didn't know what project it was for until I agreed to take the meeting, and I was thrilled when I found out that it was for 'Echo,'" she said. "I couldn't have been more excited to work with this character and play in a sandbox like this. I'm also a fan of [co-creator of the Echo comic character] David W. Mack from way back, and I'm lucky to have gotten to know him in the course of this. So I was really excited about this character because the slate was so open. There was an open sky, and we didn't know a whole lot about her from the comics other than the people that she was within the comics. So I was just really excited about all the avenues that were available to us when we started."

As far as Better Call Saul's influence, "There were several instances where we talked about character development in the vein of 'Better Call Saul.' They were very familiar with the 'Better Call Saul' characters, and I talked about that when I first met with them. I'm very interested in character development and character-forward stories, and luckily, that's something that they were just really excited about from the very beginning," Dayre said. "We were all like, 'Let's make this a grounded character story and something that is different from what we've seen before. Let's really let Maya tell her truth.' So, of course, that really spoke to me after coming from [Saul co-recators] Vince [Gilligan] and Peter's [Gould] camp, and being able to work on the characters the way we did over there."

To get a grasp on D'Onofrio's Kingpin, the writers saw Daredevil, which Disney acknowledges as canon as the sequel series Born Again is currently in production. "We talked a lot about [Maya's] background, her family, and her cultural influences. We also talked about the similar experiences of the writers who were in the room. We then talked about what we already knew about her father [Zahn McClarnon's William Lopez]. It was always Maya's show, and it wasn't about any other character, but the writers and I had all watched 'Daredevil as well.' So we were able to sit down together and watch a Kingpin supercut," Dayre said. "We only watched the Kingpin scenes from Daredevil our second time through, and watching Daredevil as if it was Kingpin's story gave us a different concept of the relationship possibilities between Maya and Fisk, and what her life may have looked like when she was growing up in New York City.

For more on how Dayre laid out Echo's foundation, establishing the series' tone, integrating ASL into the series, Netflix shows' influence, what she learned from working on Echo, and more you can check out the interview here. Echo is available to stream on Disney+.

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