Marvel’s ‘Echo’ Series Features Return of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin
Vincent D'Onofrio reprises his role as Kingpin in Marvel's upcoming series Echo starring Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez/Echo. The series follows the events of 2021's Hawkeye, also starring Cox and D'Onofrio.
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Kingpin has paternal feelings for the deaf superhero Echo. “Maya, I see everything that you are. I always have,” says Kingpin in the new Echo trailer before beating a rude street vendor. The trailer ends with Maya holding Kingpin at gunpoint as he asks, “You and I are the same, so who's the monster?”
Variety reports that Echo contains a lot of Marvel firsts: “It’s the first Marvel Studios production that will debut simultaneously on Disney+ and Hulu, the first that will have every episode available to binge at once and the first that will be rated TV-MA. And most importantly to director and executive producer Sydney Freeland (Reservation Dogs), it is the first superhero series ever to center on a deaf and a Native American character.”
The Echo Creative Team Reimagined Maya's Indigeneity
“Representation was extremely important to myself and to everyone on the crew,” said Freeland at an Echo press event in October. Freeland — a Navajo who grew up on the tribe's New Mexico reservation — said that she “grew up reading Marvel comic books” and attending traditional powwows. She and the creative team reimagined Maya's Indigeneity from the comic books' Blackfeet tribe to a member of the Choctaw tribe from Oklahoma. Cox is a member of the Menominee Nation and of Mohican descent.
Freeland says that Echo takes place after a “seismic event” in the Lopez family that sets Maya on a path toward Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin. “Maya is in a very vulnerable, emotional place after this,” said Freeland. “She’s got all this bottled-up emotion and rage and feeling inside of her, and she doesn’t know what to do with it. And there’s going to be somebody there to give her a little nudge.”
Whatever superpowers Maya has, expect them to look different than the comic books. “Her power in the comic books is that she can copy anything, any movement, any whatever. It’s kind of lame,” Freeland said. “I will say, that is not her power. I’ll just kind of leave it at that.”
Freeland described Echo as “an exploration of trauma — how we deal with it, how we cope with it, how it affects us, how we affect it, how it affects those around us. It’s not the fate of the universe at stake — this is the fate of family.”
Echo premieres simultaneously on Hulu and Disney+ on January 10, 2024.
Robert DeSalvo is a professional writer and editor with over 25 years of experience at print and online publications such as Movieline, Playboy, PCH, Fandango, and The A.V. Club. He currently lives in Los Angeles, the setting of his favorite movie, Blade Runner. Robert has interviewed dozens of actors, directors, authors, musicians, and other celebrities during his journalism career, including Brian De Palma, Nicolas Cage, Dustin Hoffman, John Waters, Sigourney Weaver, Julianne Moore, Bryan Cranston, Anne Rice, and many more. Horror movies, sci-fi, cult films as well as gothic, postpunk, and synthwave music are what Robert geeks over.
