She-Hulk star Tatiana Maslany reveals alternate finale ending that was 'more serious'

Sydney Bucksbaum
·4 min read
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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season 1 finale of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.

As a superhero meta-comedy, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law ended its first season in appropriately humorous and self-referential fashion. Jen Walters, a.k.a. She-Hulk (played by Tatiana Maslany), not only broke the fourth wall but literally smashed through the Disney+ welcome screen and entered a different show altogether.

Once inside the making-of series Marvel: Assembled, she confronted the She-Hulk writers' room and went searching for Marvel boss Kevin Feige — only to learn that he was actually an artificial intelligence known by the full name Knowledge Enhanced Visual Interconnectivity Nexus (K.E.V.I.N. for short). Pitting her lawyer skills against "the most advanced entertainment algorithm in the world," Jen successfully argued for a better season finale that would make more sense for her show. And so instead of resorting to a formulaic and "messy" fight scene, she ultimately saved the day with her legal acumen and found a way to balance work, romance, and being She-Hulk.

But that wasn't always the way She-Hulk was going to end its first season.

"[Head writer] Jessica [Gao] and I talked about the ending a lot, because tonally it could have gone in all kinds of different ways," Maslany tells EW. "Jess said that there were like 20 versions of it. I never saw 18 of those versions, but I did see two: the one that we went with and then one that we shot prior."

Tatiana Maslany in the 'She-Hulk' season 1 finale
Tatiana Maslany in the 'She-Hulk' season 1 finale

Marvel Studios Tatiana Maslany in the 'She-Hulk' season 1 finale

The alternate ending that was filmed but ultimately scrapped "was very different, a little more serious and less like Jen's version of it," Maslany adds. "It was [more of] She-Hulk, so it was way too expensive, first off. And it had a different strategy to it. The thing that I love about this one is that we get back to Jen feeling like K.E.V.I.N.'s her collaborator and like an equal, and that her ideas deserve respect. Even sitting down on the ground and asking about the X-Men is like, 'We're buddies now,' you know what I mean? Something about that feels very Jen, and feels very funny."

Maslany was "thrilled" with how the ending evolved into what it became. "I couldn't believe we got to do it," she says. "Because it's the kind of writing, it's the kind of dismantling that I get so excited about as an actor and as an audience member, and as a creative person. It's the stuff that I'm most interested in. It's such a huge moment and it requires so much clarity of idea, because it really is Jen speaking her direct truth about herself. It's the moment when she is articulating that things aren't good enough, that this isn't what she wants or deserves, and to name that, you have to know yourself really well. So it took a while to find it, but Jess always had that idea and it was always going to destroy things and at the same time build things again."

Filming the scenes where Jen breaks through Disney+ and walks into the actual She-Hulk writers' room was Maslany's favorite part of the season. "It was so fun," she says. "We shot it at different points during the series, so it was with varying levels of feeling connected to what this show was and finding the tone of it. It just felt so revelatory to be walking through the Burbank Disney lot in my mo-cap suit being like, 'This is a character for the show that is being written in that room.' It was super fun and meta."

Every line that Jen says to the writers' room and to K.E.V.I.N. about the show and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was scripted. "The only improv element of it is that on the day, I think Jessica and Zeb [Wells], the writers, were both launching [alternate lines] at me," Maslany recalls. "They would throw an alt at me or we would try this alt or we would ask K.E.V.I.N. this question."

She also reveals that the moment when Jen asks, "When are we getting the X Men?" with a wink and a thumbs-up directly to the camera was one of the alternate lines written on the spot during filming. "The X-Men question was one in a series of alts where that was the one that made it in," Maslany says. "But I definitely did not improvise it. The only thing I think I improvised was sitting on the ground, but other than that, it was all Zeb and Jessica."

The first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is streaming now on Disney+.

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