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Dominique Thorne has done a lot of research for her role as Riri Williams in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — especially as she prepares to headline her own series Ironheart. The series premieres on Tuesday on Disney+, and in an interview with ComicBook ahead of time, Thorne listed some of the Marvel Comics she read in preparation for the show. Riri was first introduced in 2016, created by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Mike Deodato. Thorne started there, and it sounds like she’s leaning hard on those early appearances where the character is first established. Still, the MCU version of the character has some important differences from her comic counterpart.
“Obviously the comics from Brian Michael Bendis and Eve Ewing were just huge in understanding that father daughter relationship to that we do get glimpses of, and where she got this name from — Ironheart,” Thorne said. “I think that was number one what I walked away from those with — the fact that her father was struck in the heart, gunshot wound to the heart, and that’s why she chose this name, Ironheart. I thought that was insane.”
Williams’ first appearance was in the monthly Invincible Iron Man, and Thorne said that those first few issues were essential to capturing the character’s confidence and her shrewd mind. In that story, Riri recovers a destroyed Iron Man suit and tries to reverse engineer it for herself. She finds that the AI inside the suit has Tony Stark’s persona, and while that doesn’t seem to be the direction the MCU is going, Thorne still enjoyed reading it as a fan.
“I thought that was pretty cool,” she said. “Between her banter, her with Tony, and of course, there Tony is her AI. I think in that format, you kind of get to see when she chooses to listen to him and when she doesn’t, and also when he’s kind of impressed with [her]. Like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think about that. But yeah, you could do it like that.’”
“That kind of also helped me see [that] she’s definitely keeping people on her toes, and wanting to see if I could take that with me into the telling that we have here,” she said. “Chinaka Hodge is our head writer, and I think I absolutely had room for that.”
As always, it’s nice to hear when the people behind these adaptations take the source material seriously and mine what they can from it, no matter how much the on-screen telling may be changed. Thorne’s performance as Riri in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has already garnered praise from fans, and many are expecting the same in Ironheart. The series premieres on Tuesday on Disney+.
“}]] Dominique Thorne has done a lot of research for her role as Riri Williams in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — especially as she prepares to headline her own series Ironheart. The series premieres on Tuesday on Disney+, and in an interview with ComicBook ahead of time, Thorne listed some of the Marvel Comics she read Read More