Interview with ‘Wonder Man’ Co-Creator and Showrunner Andrew Guest

Andrew Guest got his start in television writing working his way up from the bottom. His first credited episode of television is from the 2003 series Hope and Faith starring Faith Ford and Kelly Ripa. He kept working his way up to shows like 30 Rock, Community, and Suburgatory. He consulted on the Marvel television Hawkeye show and his first shot to run a show came with Marvel’s Wonder Man.

Wonder Man isn’t your average Marvel show. It follows Simon Williams (played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a struggling actor in Hollywood who is hoping for a big break while harboring his secret super powers. He’s befriended by aging actor Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley) who is well known as the terrorist known as the Mandarin. The pair of them get to know each other and form a fast friendship, even though there is a betrayal between them on the horizon and government stooges on their tail.

It’s a heartfelt show with twists and turns and plenty of incredible film references, from Midnight Cowboy and Pretty Woman to The Goonies and Frozen. It’s not anything you’re expecting and somehow it’s all the better for it. It’s one of the most refreshing new shows Marvel has produced and was just one surprise after another. Andrew Guest hit a homerun with his first show, and is currently hard at work on the second season. He sat down to speak with us about the work he put into the first season.

Bryan Young: This is your first foray into showrunning, but you've been working in a lot of rooms with a lot of really great people, like Dan Harmon of Twigger's Holiday [and Community] fame. What lessons from your writing career prior to this were you able to bring into the room?

Andrew Guest: So much. One of the things I really love about TV is this apprenticeship model that is sadly in danger these days, but I was somebody who didn't come to Hollywood with a brilliant script that I knew had to get made. I wanted to figure out how TV worked, and I was a PA, and then I was a writer's assistant, and then I was a staff writer, and story writer, and slowly worked my way up. Part of that was getting to spend all these hours in rooms with people like Robert Carlock, Tina Fey, Dan Harmon, Dan Goor, you name it, and they all have taught me so much.

One of the easiest things to point to is a story circle that Dan Harmon imparts on almost all of his writer's rooms, which I still use, and I still find very helpful.

You look at some of the joke crafting that goes on on 30 Rock and sitting around that table for two years and seeing the most talented joke writers I've ever met craft jokes is just incredible.

One of the other lessons I've taken away is from Dan Goor, who worked with Mike Schur, he was his number two on Parks and Rec, (and Mike Schur was Greg Daniels’ number two on The Office) they’ve all taken these lessons from Greg Daniels about character. One of them being that these jokes that are sometimes so tempting can solely chip away at a character's believability. Mike Schur calls them invisible weakeners, and you have to preserve character for TV because essentially, that's the draw. That's what's bringing people back week after week, being invested in these people and needing to have enough believability that they're worried about them and invest.

BY: Very early on in the show our characters meet over Midnight Cowboy.

What brought you to Midnight Cowboy, not just because, on the surface, it seems like a very funny joke, but as the show goes on, it feels like a very important part of the the meta narrative. How did you arrive at using that in a way that works on both of those really great layers?

AG: My first meeting was just with Brian Gay [co-Executive Producer, Wonder Man]on this project and I had been told essentially that it was going to be a two-hander. They wanted to do a two-hander about the entertainment industry, and I knew that Sir Ben [Kingsley] was going to be back as Trevor Slattery.

The first thing I said to him in one of our first meetings was thinking about Midnight Cowboy, because I picture Simon as an outsider, he's kind of this vagabond, and I thought of him on the streets of Los Angeles much like Ratso Rizzo on the streets of New York City, and Joe Buck is this sort of counter, you know? Just a different frame, just so strikingly different.

So it was a touchpoint in from the beginning for me and when we were doing the pilot and talking about that script we had them meeting in a movie theater, but I hadn't specified what the movie was.

And Sir Ben was like, “Well, it should be important thematically, whatever this movie is that we're seeing.”

And I said, “You're right.”

That's when I came back to Midnight Cowboy, and luckily we were able to license some footage from it and use it, because it's an amazing movie and an influence on the project.

BY: The entire show is very film literate, both hilariously for jokes, but also on that meta-narrative level. I'm wondering if that felt like a risk during the writing and how you all worked with that in in the writer's room. Did you ever feel like something was too on the nose? Or how that worked?

AG: I think initially, in the first conversations with Marvel, there was some fun at the idea of poking fun at superhero movies that exist in the MCU. That is still there, but it's not really the focus of the show because I think shows like The Boys have done such an incredible job of satirizing the entertainment industry and how it overlaps with the superheroes in that show and keeping their own propaganda going, essentially.

And that wasn't really the angle that was most exciting to me. I was interested in the character's point of view of being as somebody who can relate to the feeling of trying to break into an industry that can feel impenetrable and where your job is to be sensitive and artistic, but also make your day, that, to me, was the sort of the thing that got me the most excited. And I was able to get Marvel excited about that.

That was really where the heart of our show was. And that there was a real love of storytellers that I have, because I think it's an important part of what we all do.

BY: I would like to ask about the nuts and bolts about the Josh Gad episode. In fact, I have a whole host of questions there, but they're all related to the same question. Was it always Josh Gad that you’d written in the episode? Was the episode a result of the need for a complication for Simon as a part of his career? Was that a solution to a problem? Or was it created for the problem? How did this come about as part of breaking down the story?  Because it turns into a very elegant solution, even though it feels like a little bit of a side trip in the structure.

AG: So, yes. Part of what I felt like our responsibility as writers was to take something that people outside of our industry may not necessarily relate to, which is this feeling of life or death when it comes to a role or an audition or getting that job. And if you try to tell that to somebody who doesn't care about Hollywood, they're like, “So what? You didn't get a job, you still have a roof over your head. Who the fuck cares?”

But it feels like life or death.

I felt like we needed externalized stakes to make those things concrete. So we needed a cautionary tale because Simon doesn't just want this job, he wants to have an artistic, fulfilling career. He doesn't want to just be a flash in the pan. So let's tell the story about a flash in the pan, right? Let's give our audience a real understanding of Simon's worst nightmare.

And one of our writers at one point came into our room, Zeke [Nicholson], who ended up writing in that episode and was like, have you heard of this character? It's a real MCU character. His name is DeMarr Davis. He's a doorman. He's one of the Great Lakes Avengers, and his only superpower is he becomes a door. And we were all very excited. And you know writers' rooms, many I've been a part of, like to do departure episodes. We like to pitch them. It is fun for us creatively.

It is hard sell sometimes and I felt like we needed to earn it if we were going to do it, and I felt like it needed to be essential to the Simon/Trevor story, but this felt like something that was essential, and it allowed us the ability to widen our scope of the show. The show wasn't just about these two characters, the show was about Hollywood more. It’s about what happens in this town, both good and bad.

And as far as it comes to Josh Gad, he wasn't necessarily the first person who was pitched in that role, but one of the things that episode allowed us to do was have a little bit of a different tone for our series as well.

Most of our show is pretty grounded and and we try to be faithful to the reality of things, but getting to recreate who Josh Gad was, going out to clubs, starring in action movies, and singing “In Summer” in it allowed us to take all the sort of bigger, broader ideas and throw them into one episode in a really fun way.

BY: So you were able to do rewrites once he came on, to rewrite and punch up for him? What did that episode look like before you knew who you were able to get to do it? How do you craft an episode like that without knowing who it is?

AG: Well, we knew what DeMarr’s story was. We knew that this was the whole point. This was a guy who was really just happy where he was. Of all the people who were in Los Angeles, he didn't want to be famous, and he gets superpowers because he just touches some goo, and does this one heroic act which thrusts him forward. So he needed this partner and was always going to be hopefully another celebrity who was like a two-hander, like a Simon/Trevor parallel.

Before it was Josh, it was just a celebrity. We didn't get specific. And then once Josh said yes we were able to do it. Obviously there was no “In Summer” sequence, it was just a guy who went to clubs, but once we got Josh on board, we got those things for him, which was really fun.

BY: I want to ask about the the beating heart of the series really turns into. It’s that relationship between Simon and Trevor, and it culminates in that moral dilemma of how it plays out when Simon realizes that Trevor has been working against him and then how Trevor's going to fix it. What was the “Aha!” moment when you realized that Trevor was going to bring back the Mandarin and when did those dominoes fall when you realized, “OK, this is what we're working toward”?

AG: That’s a very good question. And as originally pitched, I knew I wanted to take Trevor to task as a character because I feel like if he's going to make it through eight episodes where he's the co-lead with this other character, we have to be able to examine him and give him an arc. And part of what has previously gone on for this character in the MCU is he's kind of like this Zelig/Forrest Gump character who is cast to the winds by circumstance... he gets wrapped up in in terrorist schemes, then he gets freed out of prison, then he gets swept up with the good guys in Shang-Chi, but he's never really choosing or taking action.

I felt like part of what would be nice to explore is starting from the same place where he gets off a plane and suddenly he's thrust into new circumstances. He's literally pounced upon and thrown out into the world again in order to do somebody else's bidding, but for him as a character to finally, for the first time, come to terms with ownership over his own decisions and actions.

That was always going to be there, but it wasn't necessarily always going to be him deciding to take credit for an explosion on the set. That was something that we came to as a room and with Marvel producers involvement, realizing that was sitting there as an option, that needing to embrace the thing that he's been fighting for a whole season about wanting to move past this darkness and having to go back to it in order to do something heroic felt like it was the right move.

BY: I think it was really elegantly laid out to the point where, when he trots it back out, it has that “surprising but inevitable” quality, and that's really how it felt, where it feels like that's the only way it could have gone by the time it gets there.

AG: Yeah.

BY: As you were going through the different processes as a showrunner, you're going through the different phases of production with the writing, how much did the show change from the initial scripts, through production, through editing, as showrunner? How did the writing change across the movements there?

AG: Structurally, we were pretty much done figuring out everything by the end of our writers' room. And one of the things that saddens me about the way TV gets made these days is I wasn't able to keep my writers on throughout production and have them be a part of that process. It was left to me to then do rewrites from that point on. And there were still casting things that needed that, you know, I don't know if Josh Gad was cast. I don't think he was.

Von Kovak is a character. We were still going out to real directors looking for somebody to potentially play themselves in that role and then realized we would be better off casting a real actor without because the role got bigger and bigger. Things like that continued to change.

And the finale, we hadn't figured that out. That was something I was left with. But this was not a show that got torn apart throughout that next process. All those things were really helpful to continue to tell the story. We were luckily always on the same page about trying to tell it. Marvel wanted the show that we wanted to make, which is not always the case, and we were thrilled to be doing that.

BY: If there's anything that the you sitting here now could tell yourself as far as the writing goes at the beginning of the process, what would that be? What would you wish that you could have known as a writer then?

AG: The thing that having never run a show or a writers' room before, one of the things that's most difficult is you want to open up the floor to everybody and invite them in to bring, essentially, their thoughts about what the show could be to you and and see other directions for it to take. And it can be hard in those early weeks when you haven't shot a pilot, when you haven't even cast Simon Williams. It's a slippery thing, are we all talking about, do we see the same image in our heads?

Part of the learning curve for me, certainly, was figuring out how to be receptive and stay true and continue to listen and support outside ideas, while reminding people of what I think is right and how we all can come together.

And doing a season two is much easier because there's a show. We know what it is. And now let's all get excited about new things to do with it.

BY: Having said that, what's the next biggest thing you're taking into the writing, moving into either season two or any show you'd be walking into, putting that aside?

AG: It's about figuring out why the story needs to get told, like, what is the most exciting part of it and trying to hold onto that North Star and make sure that all the work that we're doing is supporting that main concept.

And sometimes you even pull apart that main concept and realize it was really always about something else. But one of the things about this show was always wanting to celebrate this artist's journey. I feel like we stayed true to that. We were because we were a bunch of sensitive artists who were making this destiny, Yahya [Abdul-Mateen II], Sir Ben [Kingsley], and myself, like we really feel those things.

And so we got to express it all and put it all onto the screen.

BY: I think you all did a great job. I really enjoyed the show and revisiting it do this, it was even better on rewatching it, all of the the stuff hit even better, there's a lot of subtlety in the writing that you don't all necessarily catch on that first viewing. It's really sharp, especially in that meta space with the film references. As a film nerd and a fellow writer seeing that stuff in there—you're not dropping references to movies on accident.

AG: Nope. Which was really fun for us.

Wonder Man is currently streaming on Disney+.

Season two is currently in production.

You can find out more about Bryan Young at his website.