How Jennifer Walters Changes as She-Hulk Explained

In the upcoming She-Hulk: Attorney at Law series on Disney+, the world is not only going to be introduced to Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer Walters character but also her She-Hulk counterpart. She-Hulk, however, is not quite the rage monster than her cousin Bruce Banner’s Hulk figure is. As the upcoming nine episodes will show, Jennifer Walters transforming into a hulk does not come with all of the same out-of-control tendencies and rage. Instead, it comes with a new swagger for Jen as she inhabits her big, green self and the world around her changes just as much.

“I think people receive Jen very differently when she’s She-Hulk than they do Jen Walters,” Maslany told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “And that’s something that Jen, I think feeds off of in a way that she does get, you know, a little hit of confidence. It’s fun to be looked at like that. But then at the same time, I feel like she also has a fraudulent sort of feeling around it. Or she doesn’t totally feel like she can own that and that people might not be looking at her, but looking at just She-Hulk.”

For director Kat Coiro, finding the nuance in differentiating Jen and She-Hulk was an integral part of the series. “That to me is one of the most interesting questions that the series poses is you know, Jennifer Walters is so different from Bruce Banner,” Coiro said. “When she hulks out, she maintains her identity, but her identity is also affected by the way that she’s perceived and the way people look at her. And there’s a moment in the pilot when she gets out of Bruce’s saw machine, and she kind of does a little shimmy and feels this new body for the first time. And there were a lot of discussions with Tatiana about, you know, what that meant, what does it mean to present so differently but still feel like the same person on the inside. And that’s a huge part of her journey.”

In the comics, Jen becomes She-Hulk after receiving an emergency blood transfusion from her cousin Bruce. Unlike Hulk, she retains her consciousness as Coiro laid out. What took Hulk years to master, She-Hulk can control in minutes. Bruce, a male scientist, has quite a different experience when moving through the world compared to Jen, a female attorney.

“Jen Walters herself is very much a rule follower but she is also in this like very unique position where it’s already weird and and wild to become a Hulk,” She-Hulk writer Jessica Gao explained. “it’s even more unique and strange that it’s the second time it’s happened in her family and so she’s in this unique position where the family has already dealt with this once before and so it’s old hat to them in the way that this could possibly be old hat to any family. So it’s not as shocking now because someone’s already kind of broken the mold for that and it’s just one more thing that she really has to deal with in terms of like processing how she’s going to accept this.”

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