Another day, another superhero project letting slip its wish lists for actors to fill the lead roles. In this case, we have two of the Marvel/Netflix Defenders shows on the hunt for potential talent to don the central costumes. For Jessica Jones, the likes of Krysten Ritter, Alexandra Daddario, Teresa Palmer and Jessica De Gouw are all under consideration while Lance Gross and Mike Colter are potential Luke Cages.
Jessica Jones is a fellow former Midtown high school classmate of Peter Parker’s, irradiated in a car crash with a military convoy carrying radioactive chemicals. She wakes from a coma with super strength and the ability to fly (although she never properly masters it), renames herself 'Jewel' and sets herself on a superhero path that leads to substantial suffering. According to Deadline, the series will draw from Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ Alias comics run, where a traumatised Jessica has decided to put her superhero days behind her and open up a detective agency that caters to more regular crimes as well as some superheroic incidents.
Jones and Luke Cage have something of a history in the comics (they’ve been married and raised children together) so it may not surprise you to learn that he’ll be showing up on her show before launching his own.
Melissa Rosenberg is overseeing the Jones series and appears to be looking at actresses with genre experience or comic chops, which would make sense. Daddario, who was recently in True Detective, is a veteran of the Percy Jackson films. Ritter, who will be seen in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, has starred in sitcoms and was briefly on Breaking Bad. Palmer was superheroic as an alien in I Am Number Four and romanced Nicholas Hoult’s zombie in Warm Bodies. De Gouw has appeared on the recent Dracula miniseries and on DC Comics’ Arrow, so this would mean crossing the aisle in superhero TV terms.
As for the men who would be Cage, Colter has been seen on The Following and The Good Wife, while Gross was part of the cast for recent US TV series Crisis and Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions Of A Marriage Counsellor. It’s early days for the casting in both cases, but it sounds like there is a healthy batch of candidates for the jobs. Daredevil, of course, is already filming, ready to launch on screens next year.