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Elodie Yung’s Elektra on Daredevil Season 2: “Kind of a Sociopath,” but “Not a Bad Person”

elektra

We’ve known since last summer that Elektra would appear on Daredevil‘s second season (whether Frank Miller likes it or not), and that Elodie Yung would have the honor of portraying the role. Yung told CBR that she’s been reading the comics, and she has some thoughts on her character:

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What I tried to capture by reading the comics is, I wanted to keep the coldness. And we had conversations at length with [showrunners] Doug [Petrie] and Marco [Ramirez]. We think Elektra is kind of a sociopath. This world is a game for her. It’s like a chess game, and what motivates her is what she wants. She’ll use anything she needs to use to get to her goal, and if she needs to kill people, she would.

She has this coldness and this sociopath in her, and I tried to keep that. But on the other hand, we wanted to create a character with different layers. And I think Elektra isn’t a bad person. She’s not a good person. She’s a person with different traits, with layers, and she’s seeking for who she is. In this season, there’s an arc to her story, and hopefully, she’ll find — we’ll find out who she is really by the end of it.

Every time an actor or writer refers to a character as a “sociopath,” my hackles raise, because I know they’re probably using that word as a pejorative and might be on the verge of making some inaccurate generalizations. That’s still the case here, but it also doesn’t seem like Yung (and her colleagues) want us to see Elektra as a stereotypical “crazy” villain with unrealistic behavior. Unless they do want that. But we’ll have to watch to find out, I guess …

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of buzz about Elektra’s potential costume(s)—the face mask she wears in the promo (above) has never appeared in any design before. Doug Petrie chose not to answer directly, because he’s doing his job:

What we were thinking first and foremost were two questions. One was, what looks cool? How much do we love the comics? And can we do that? And then, also, in terms of bringing Elodie in and kind of her martial arts training, which is so evident in what she does and who she is as a character, what would you really fight in? What would protect you? And, also, Elektra isn’t just about protection. She’s a little bit of a stylist. So we threw all of that into the mix.

What type of costume do you hope Elektra has? And more importantly, what sort of character traits do you hope she’ll have? Does Elodie Yung’s description give you pause? According to IMDB, her character is in every single episode of the second season, so I sure hope we’ll like her.

(via Comic Book Resources, image via Netflix)

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Author
Maddy Myers
Maddy Myers, journalist and arts critic, has written for the Boston Phoenix, Paste Magazine, MIT Technology Review, and tons more. She is a host on a videogame podcast called Isometric (relay.fm/isometric), and she plays the keytar in a band called the Robot Knights (robotknights.com).

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