Early in Episode 1 of Marvel Studios’ She-Hulk, Bruce Banner makes a comment to his fuzzball cousin, Jennifer Walters, that if she’s not careful with her newfound Hulk abilities, people won’t see the Hulk — they’ll only see a monster.
Jen, still hellbent on not becoming a Hulk let alone a Super Hero, brushes Bruce’s comments aside. She knows how to control her anger and rage (hey, she’s a woman after all) so there’s no way her emotions are going to get the better of her. She’s not going to let the monster come out.
Flash forward to Episode 8 of the season, and Bruce’s warning has come back to haunt her. During a gala honoring her as a recipient of the Female Lawyer of the Year award, Intelligencia hacks the presentation and flashes private moments of Jen’s life across the screen for the entire audience, including a video of her and Josh hooking up. Overcome with rage at the moment, Jen lashes out and destroys the entire video screen, sending the audience fleeing outside. But Jen’s still not done. She grabs one of the Intelligencia goons and roars at him before she realizes she’s been surrounded by Damage Control.
The one thing Jen insisted she wasn’t going to let happen, happened.
The creative team behind She-Hulk, many of whom identify as female, were intent on pulling from their own real-life experiences to capture the full spectrum of Jen’s emotional state, exploring the rage and sadness Jen has been forced to bottle up this whole time only to let it bubble over now.
“I think it’s so important to have the representation behind the camera match the representation in front of the camera because there are just so many life experiences, these lived-in experiences, and nuances that you can’t fake and you can’t replicate if you really just don’t understand it,” Head writer Jessica Gao tells Marvel.com. “Having all these women who all have different life experiences and perspectives and points of view really helped fill out this very well-rounded cast and this world.”
Gao mentions that the creative team began “mining each other’s lives” to find common threads, and “those were the things that we really wanted to infuse in the show so that women who watch the show really felt seen and really felt represented.”
One of those, of course, was being forced to keep emotions in check even in the worst situations. And even though Jen might turn into a 6’7” towering green Hulk, she’s still Jen Walters, and the experiences she has as Just Jen aren’t going to go away.
“She is a woman who walks through the world and has experienced things that every woman has experienced,” Director and executive producer Kat Coiro, who helmed Episode 8, explains. “We just took these very relatable experiences that women have and put them on to this character who is able to defend herself and doesn’t have to be polite if she doesn’t want to because she has brawn that most women don’t have. It really felt like an organic part of the process. As we introduce her to the MCU, we introduce a fully-formed female character who has experiences that we can all relate to.”
Unfortunately, one of those experiences happens to be when your privacy is violated in the most public way, as Jen watches a video captured of her and Josh (ugh, that guy), play out for her friends, family, and colleagues and it’s too much for her to handle.
