Posted in: Disney+, Marvel, streaming, TV | Tagged: disney, Kat Corio, she-hulk, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, tatiana maslany

She-Hulk Director Kat Coiro Wants to "Honor the Comedy," Remove Labels

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law represents a break of sorts for the largely serious Marvel Cinematic Universe as a comedy. Kat Coiro has a wealth of experience well outside of the MCU with romcoms like Marry Me and TV shows like Peacock's Girls5Eva and Netflix's Dead to Me. The director and executive producer opened up about her legal comedy inspirations for the series based on the Stan Lee and John Buscema comic, playing in Marvel's sandbox, and what she hopes the Disney+ comedy can change about the superhero genre as a whole.

"I wanted to honor the comedy. I have a comedy background, and so much of comedy is very simply letting actors be and leaving room for improvisation and looseness," Coiro told Slash Film about signing on to She-Hulk. "Now, of course, we have a show that is full of CGI and action and stunts and also has to honor the MCU and feel like it's part of that universe. So it was really a balance of finding the moments for the big and then finding the moments for the small and making sure that those transitions felt seamless. And that we never went from a jarringly big cinematic extravaganza to a little tiny comedy. But that was the biggest challenge of the series, for sure."

A couple of Coiro's inspirations were vehicles for Calista Flockhart and Reese Witherspoon. "I drew on the comics and the character herself, who is self-referential and self-aware and large and in charge," she said. "I drew from 'Ally McBeal' and 'Legally Blonde,' [which] I think took the legal genre and turned it on its head and injected it with pink and wildness. That's something we definitely do, is take something very familiar and make it a little bit strange. But really, it was the MCU films that I looked to, to make sure that we fit into the world."

Coiro hopes the superhero fandom will graduate from labels. "The MCU has done such a great job of bringing female characters to the forefront. And I think this is just part of that evolution and that step," she said. "So I was talking about the new generation, just having it be normal to have female superheroes. My dream is that they aren't called 'female superheroes' anymore. They're just superheroes, in the same way my dream is to not be ever called a 'female director' again, but just be called a director. I want superheroes to join the pantheon, and some of them just happen to be women." For more about how Coiro feels about using She-Hulk to promote body positivity, you can check out the whole interview here. She-Hulk, which stars Tatiana Maslany, Mark Ruffalo, Tim Roth, Benedict Wong, Ginger Gonzaga, Jameela Jamil, Jon Bass, Mark Linn-Baker, and Renée Elise Goldsberry, premieres on Disney+ on August 18th.

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