New Details Revealed About Luke Cage Season Two Villains, “Heroes for Hire” and More
The first issue of Empire‘s Pilot magazine features several juicy sneak peeks of what’s to come on the second season of Marvel’s Luke Cage. The magazine interviews the Netflix series’ showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker, as well as stars Mike Colter and Simone Missick. They discuss season one’s shortcomings, a spinoff and what’s to come in the new season.
Here are the most interesting spoilery scoops:
Bushmaster
This version of the villain is described as “bullet resistant” by Coker and he explains that “It’s not gonna bounce off, but he has his ways of healing. And he has very similar strength to Luke in terms of being able to take a punch and give a punch.”
“Jamaica has always been a country of resistance,” he says, touching on Bushmaster’s Carribean background. “They were the first to cast off their shackles and say, ‘We have our own government, this is how we’re doing things.’ We put a lot of that stuff into the character of Bushmaster.”
Misty Knight
“It’s her shooting hand, it’s her basketball hand, it’s her everything,” Missick says, referring to the character’s newfound disability and the impact it will have on her. “How does this person who is identified by her strength and her power as a cop do that job? She can’t. So we see Misty at the top of the season walking away from the thing that defined her.”
Missick adds: “I’ve got a lot more stunts this season.”
Danny Rand and “Heroes for Hire”
“Danny helps Luke channel his chi,” Coker says, which results “in a fight to end all fights that was just one of the most fun things we’ve done.”
“Me and Finn get along rather well, we’re pretty cool. I think our characters play well off each other,” Colter teased before making it clear that the chances of a Heroes for Hire show is “a question above my pay grade.”
Coker, on the other hand, is a little more positive. “It’s something that’s in the air. Internally at Marvel Television, everybody knows there’s a part of that combination that is inevitable, particularly when you watch them together in the way that we did it. If feels right. It feels good. It feels like, ‘I want to see more of this combination. Heroes for Hire is really not off the table.'”
Season One’s Shortcomings
“The standard conventional wisdom is that the show was great up until episode 7, and then went downhill because Diamondback wasn’t as good a villain as Cottonmouth,” Coker admits. “But as Jeph Loeb, the President of Marvel Television jokes, Mahershala couldn’t have followed Mahershala!”
“It was a great try,” Colter confesses when asked about that first run of episodes. “Some people enjoy the full season. Some really felt the second part was not as strong as the first. And I get both…but you’ve got to take a chance to make your series different, and I thought it was commendable. If people thought it was a miss, that’s fine. We have a different approach for the next season.”
The magazine confirms that Gabrielle Dennis will be playing Nightshade, a character from the comic books who was a biochemist with a strong interest in lycanthropy.
Season 2 of Marvel’s Luke Cage streams June 22 on Netflix.
H/T: ComicBookMovie
Mustafa Shakir and Gabrielle Dennis Have Been Cast in Luke Cage Season 2
Marvel announced this Wednesday that Mustafa Shakir from “The Deuce” and “The Night Of” and Gabrielle Dennis from “Insecure” and “Rosewood” have joined the cast in Season 2 of Netfix’s Luke Cage.
According to Marvel, Shakir will be playing ‘John McIver,’ a natural leader, brimming with charisma, whose mission is focused on Harlem and vengeance.
Dennis, on the other side, will play ‘Tilda Johnson’ who is a brilliant, holistic doctor with a complicated history in Harlem where, as much as she tries to stay far from trouble, it seems to always find her.
Source: Marvel.