Krysten Ritter: The Woman Behind TV’s Badass ‘Jessica Jones’
A veteran producer and screenwriter, Rosenberg had worked on a superheroine show before — the WB Networks’ short-lived Birds of Prey, about a trio of female DC characters who pick up where Batman left off. But it was her work writing the Twilight films that attracted the attention of various studios, and when she suddenly found herself taking meetings all over town, she already had a pitch on deck. “I wanted to create a female superhero like Tony Soprano,” she says. “So when I went to talk to the executives at ABC Studios, they paired me with [Head of Television for Marvel] Jeph Loeb. I mentioned the idea to him, and he said ‘I think I have something for you.’ Then he brought me the Alias books, and it was exactly the kind of character I’d been waiting my whole career to write.”
And according to Rosenberg, Ritter had already been on her radar for years; she’d been a fan of her turn on Breaking Bad, and her husband Lev Spiro had directed a Don’t Trust the B— in Apartment 23 episode, so she knew the actress had dual sets of chops. “Drama is easier to come by in actors,” the producer says. “But the ability to shift from drama to comedy — sometimes on a dime in any given scene — that’s much harder to come by. We needed someone who had those edgy comedic skills, could deliver a dry line and give you a sense of what this character has gone through. That’s a rare talent.”
It’s that frothy-to-fraught balancing act, which extends not just to Ritter’s wisecracking gumshoe but to the series as a whole, that largely sets Jessica Jones apart from the bulk of today’s comic-book TV. (That, and the fact that you have superheroes engaging in rough, apartment-wrecking sex with each other within the first two episodes.) For every costume-cameltoe joke and bit of tough-dame banter that the actress trades with costars Carrie-Anne Moss and Rachael Taylor — playing a lawyer who uses Jones on jobs and a radio-show host who shares a history with the P.I., respectively — there are scenes where the character finds herself suffering through some dark PTSD nights of the soul. Whether the character retains her self-destructive mojo when she eventually becomes part of Netflix/Marvel’s superteam show The Defenders down the line remains to be seen. But for now, the collaboration has yielded something closer to the “difficult men” prestige dramas of TV’s new Golden Age than a second-tier MCU offshoot.
“It’s a psychological thriller first, and a superhero show second,” she muses. “It’s exactly the kind of female-led show I’d watch. And I kick a lot of ass without having to wear a leotard.”
Additional reporting by David Ehrlich