‘Echo’ Director & EP Sydney Freeland On How Marvel Crafted Its First TV-MA Series

Echo marks a lot of firsts for Marvel Studios.

The five-episode series introduces the MCU’s first deaf and Native American character, Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox). It’s also the first series to debut under Marvel’s new spotlight banner, and it’s the first Marvel series to receive a TV-MA rating.

None of this is lost on director and executive producer Sydney Freeland, who didn’t necessarily intend to make an MCU series with so many historic milestones. In fact, the series is anything but grandiose. Instead, Marvel Studios is taking audiences down a grittier, more down-to-earth (literally and figuratively) path than it really ever has with Echo.

“We did not set out to make a TV-MA show, but we did know it was going to be grounded. It was going to be gritty. It was going to be a little more visceral and street level, and the question was just, how [far] can we go?” Freeland explained to Deadline.

The answer is pretty far. Echo takes some big swings, both in terms of its gruesomeness as well as its pursuit of a culturally aware depiction of a Deaf and Indigenous lead character. It is unlike anything Marvel has put forth thus far in more than a decade of MCU projects.

Freeland has already spoken extensively about how she carefully crafted the series both in front of and behind the camera in terms of both authenticity and accessibility. In an interview with Deadline, she explained that process in more detail.

All five episodes of Echo debut on Disney+ and Hulu on Tuesday night — another first for Marvel.

DEADLINE: Maya’s powers are different in the series than in the comics. What went into the decision to change that, and how did you arrive at those new powers?

SYDNEY FREELAND: Authenticity was extremely important for us. In the book, she’s from the Blackfeet tribe, but there’s no cultural specifics, there’s no language specifics, there’s nothing. It’s beautifully illustrated. Don’t get me wrong. Watercolor backdrops and and great, interesting Native American iconography imagery. But it’s just cool imagery. That’s all it is. There’s no specificity behind it. On the Deaf side, she’s portrayed as like an expert lip reader. One of the things that we found in our talking with our Deaf consultants and our deaf writers and even our deaf actors is even the best lip readers in the world can only understand like 30% of what’s being said. I think there are some things in the comics that were at odds with what we’re trying to do in terms of authenticity and cultural specificity, being true to the Deaf experience. A lot of that was the motivation for changes. And we changed [Maya’s descent to] Choctaw. We had talked in the writers room, and we had that specific background history. The goal was to tell a grounded, realistic street level story and those things just lend themselves to that.

DEADLINE: You’ve talked a bit about making sure the framing accommodated ASL, but in terms of developing the series, how did you make sure that you were crafting a dynamic story that lent itself to a non-speaking lead?

FREELAND: That’s an interesting question. I will say it was an evolution to get it right. First and foremost, we have to tell the story. We’re not making a public service announcement. We have to have something that is ultimately engaging for fans and for audiences. We didn’t start with this. We tried a lot of different things to get to that point. We tried a lot of, you know, frankly, gimmicks. We asked ourselves, ‘Do we need to compensate for the fact that we have characters that aren’t speaking for minutes at a time?’ And, in hindsight, I want to go back and tell myself it’s gonna be fine. It’s going to play fine. It’s going to be great, and you can have a deep, moving, emotional scene with two characters who never speak a single word verbally. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in the entire series is, without spoiling anything, the scene between two characters where not single word spoken for I think like three and a half, four minutes, and it’s absolutely emotional. It brings me to tears every time I see it. I’m trying to to explain without going too into the weeds. Basically, we tried a lot of different things before we arrived at this.

DEADLINE: Can you share some of the suggestions made from the Choctaw Nation, or considerations you made due to their feedback?

FREELAND: It is important that we get the permission of the Choctaw people. I think a lot of times people come in, and it’s an afterthought. I’ve experienced this myself, but people come to me with scripts about Native American people and they’re like, ‘Hey, we need a Native person to look at this script and just give us a thumbs up. We need a rubber stamp.’ That was extremely important for myself. As far as their feedback, again, without spoiling stuff, there are specific cultural events that we portray. I think where they were invaluable was we want to be respectful in certain events that we’re portraying, and they were helpful in sharing what couldn’t be seen. There were certain things that were culturally sensitive and culturally taboo. Those things we steered away from and we found creative solutions for. In the second episode, we go to a time period pre-European contact, and we visit a portion of America that I think no one has ever seen before, including myself. I don’t think that’s hyperbolic to say that. We had to draw from resources that don’t exist. There isn’t written documentation about this world that we’re creating. The Choctaws were so crucial in that because they had their own written histories or oral histories and cultures and traditions that were drawn from, and it really was a collaboration between myself, our production and the Choctaws, and several other entities as well.

DEADLINE: In the first episode, we see Maya make her first kill…it really sets the tone for the series. Can you talk about the importance of that scene in the context of the rest of the series?

FREELAND: We refer to [that scene’ internally as ‘The Birth of a Villain.’ What I really liked about it on the page is that Maya comes into that scene as a teenage girl and she leaves that scene as a cold-blooded killer. So really wanted to shoot it as a oner. I wanted to see that transformation happen in real time. I wanted to try to put the audience in her shoes for a brief amount of time, literally even.

DEADLINE: Can you talk more about pulling off the one-shot fight scene?

FREELAND: We had the benefit of Marvel resources, but at the same time, we didn’t have benefit of a feature film schedule. So we didn’t have the nearly the amount of rehearsal time, prep time that we would have had if this was a feature. Talking with my stunt coordinator, very early on we knew we were gonna do this. And the question was, like, ‘Can we pull off a oner because of the logistics involved and the time involved?’ The key was just let’s commit. We’re gonna go down this [path]. It’s gonna be a home run or strike out, but let’s commit. So once we were all on board, I just said, ‘Let’s commit’ and we did and, again, couldn’t be happier with the result. I think you need some things to work in your favor too. I think having Alaqua being so down to do her own stunts and to get physical and to be in there in with the training, that only helps you, because there’s some actors that don’t want to do that. They actively avoid doing stunts, and so you’re relying heavily on the stunt double to do the lion’s share of the work. I think Alaqua helped contribute to making that scene what it is. It definitely takes a village.

DEADLINE: Marvel fans are very excited for this Daredevil appearance. How did you choose to bring him into the story without detracting from the otherwise very grounded story that doesn’t interact much with the larger MCU?

FREELAND: It’s Maya’s story. We talked about early on, is Daredevil even gonna be in the series? It wasn’t a formality. The conversation was always, always, always how can we use these characters in service of Maya. In this case, it’s a great leverage point for the story…I’m going to spoil stuff.

DEADLINE: I know, it’s hard to talk about some of these scenes without getting really in the weeds. This is Marvel’s first TV-MA series, but did it start out that way? When did you know it would be that dark?

FREELAND: We did not set out to make a TV-MA show, but we did know it was going to be grounded. It was going to be gritty. It was going to be a little more visceral and street level, and the question was just, how [far] can we go? For myself, I’m down to go as far as [I can]. I want to push the envelope as far as Marvel will let me. In this case, Marvel let us go quite far with it. But really it all comes down the story. If you look at this character, she’s a high ranking lieutenant in Kingpin’s army, and she’s the boots on the ground. It’s not the people at the top who do the dirty work. It’s the people who have boots on the ground. If Maya is going to come into Kingpin’s fold to the point where she’s being taken in as his niece, almost like an unhealthy father-daughter dynamic, she has to do something that’s going to put her on his radar. All roads lead to that. You have to have that. So with that, then the conversation is becomes ‘Well, okay, so how can we do this? How can we show this?’ She’s got to do some dirty work, you know? She has to show a certain degree of ruthlessness that that Kingpin would identify with and gravitate towards. So all those things just sort of contribute to creating something that was more graphic.