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SDCC: Jeffrey Wright will play The Watcher in MCU's first animated series, What If?
Marvel Studios may have sat out San Diego Comic-Con last year, but now that we're on the other side of Avengers: Endgame, things have changed. You might say that they've changed x3000.
SYFY WIRE was at the Goliath-sized Marvel panel today, where, among other bombshells, Kevin Feige announced that the MCU would create its first animated series, which will involve almost all of the MCU actors. Most importantly, the legendary Jeffrey Wright is set to voice The Watcher in the series, which they are calling What If?, borrowing the popular comic concept. The project will air on Disney+.
Wright came out to big applause, and said, "It's really exciting to be part of the MCU, of course. It's also for me, a way to get my son to return my texts... I'm terribly excited. it's modern mythmaking, you guys thrill to this stuff and I'm stoked to be here."
While they haven't been featured to an extreme extent in the MCU thus far, the Watchers were seen in a couple of small "blink and you miss them" moments in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 2. They were the large beings with the big heads that Stan Lee was talking to about his many cameos.
In the comics, the Watchers are alien beings who watch over the multiverse. The title of this series would seem to suggest alternate possibilities in a vast array of multiverses, so it makes sense that a Watcher would be involved. Perhaps the MCU was as impressed with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as the rest of us were.
Wright is a great choice to voice this being — he's mostly known to genre audiences from his role on Westworld (as well as his recurring gig as Felix Leiter in the Bond movies), but he's also a Tony award-winning stage actor (as well as the winner of an Emmy and a Golden Globe), and his versatility knows no bounds. If any actor is truly able to ponder the question posed by the title of this series, it is Jeffrey Wright.
Look for the MCU to jump headfirst into a multiverse of animation when What If? debuts in the summer of 2021.
Click here for SYFY WIRE's full coverage of San Diego Comic-Con 2019, including up-to-the-minute news, exclusive interviews, and videos.
