Writer Drew Pearce discusses the story of Marvel One-Shot: All Hail the King

January 17th 2014, 12:14pm

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

The other day I was thinking about all the gripes overall with characters that have leapt from the pages of comic books to the big screen. There’s nitpicking for every single character. There’s no one perfect adaptation. Okay, maybe Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man but that’s the exception to the rule.

For example, Ben Kingsley is an excellent actor. He brought Trevor Slattery, the man behind the Mandarin to life. Though you may not have liked the direction that writer Drew Pearce took the character, Kingsley is pretty solid. But will we be able to see the Mandarin in a different light with the Marvel One-Shot: ALL HAIL THE KING?

Pearce discussed getting to know Trevor better, and how the one shot started off as a short:

I wrote a Trevor [short], actually, during shooting of ‘Iron Man 3’ down in North Carolina. And we all liked it, but it was kind of dealing with a different part of Trevor’s life. It was more of a straight-up retrospective of who Trevor was, and it felt like the One-Shots work best when there’s action and intrigue and a real story to tell in the short, rather than just filling in the blanks. Though the One-Shots are technically a Blu-ray extra, I think they’re kind of the most elaborate, richly put together Blu-ray extras in history. I think they work best when they don’t just function as an extra scene, but they expand [the story].

Regardless of how good or bad the ideas were, Joss Whedon told Pearce that he needed to utilize Kingsley:

We kicked about a whole bunch of my ideas, [and] some of them stuck, some of them didn’t,” explains Pearce. “[Then] I said ‘Oh, Sir Ben loves Trevor, so I think there’s a chance we could do a Trevor short.’ Joss was literally incredulous, and just said, ‘Look, you’ve got access to one of the world’s very best actors, why are we even having this discussion?’ And so it was born.

The idea here with Trevor was to bring out what’s best about the character in the worst situation according to Pearce:

What’s interesting about Trevor, is he’s only funny if everything around him is real. He’s almost funnier the more real and threatening the stuff around him is. So my whole thing all along [was], if we’re going to do a short about Trevor, everything else in it has to be real and brutal and kind of scary, because that’s kind of the amazing thing about Trevor–in the face of true and actual terror, he still acts like a mental case. And actually, it’s almost where he thrives. So that’s why we shot in a real prison, [and] a whole bunch of the extras we used were real ex-cons. I really wanted it to feel like we were shooting an early-’70s, late-’60s prison movie that Trevor Slattery had just happened to wander into.

Does any of this chatter from Pearce make the One-Shot more intriguing to you? What would you want to see? Marvel One-Shot: All Hail The King will be attached to the THOR: THE DARK WORLD blu-ray/DVD, which hits shelves on February 25, 2014.