Echo Composer Dave Porter Breaks Down His First Marvel Studios Experience

Dave Porter is a composer known for scoring many iconic projects, including Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. This month, the musician made his Marvel Studios debut scoring Echo, the new series that debuted as #1 on both Disney and Hulu. The show follows Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) after the events of Hawkeye, and currently has a 73% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. As of last week, there are rumors that Marvel Studios is working on Maya Lopez’s next MCU appearance. In honor of the show’s success, ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with Porter, and he opened up about his first Marvel experience. 

“Yeah, I didn’t actually grow up a comic book kid and didn’t have any particular affinity for the Marvel stuff one way or the other, not that I disliked it by any means, but I wasn’t a big uber fan or anything,” Porter explained. “But I’d just come off of a 15-year run working on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, in that universe. And I was just really looking to challenge myself and do something very different for me, a little outside of the box, push my boundaries a little bit and things just happened to come along, and it provided that opportunity, but still had the things that I really love in a project, which is personal stakes, personal evolution, really grounded, just visceral storytelling. And I knew that’s what they were after for Echo, and so it just was a great fit.”

“At the end of the day, there’s definitely some big differences from how I’ve worked in the past, mostly just because there’s such a big team there at Marvel and that it’s just different, it works in different ways, but I don’t think they’re any more or less creative necessarily. I was worried about it, I’ll be honest,” Porter admitted. 

“There’s a lot of folks and a lot of people,” he continued. “But in truth, what I found was that first of all, having all those people is an enormous boon. I’m so used to having to do everything. And now I’ve got… On this project, I had this wonderful group of people who are so knowledgeable and of course very knowledgeable about Marvel stuff, which I’m not. So that was enormously helpful to have them. They always had my back with anything we needed to do. And then, when it comes down to the real tough and important creative decisions, at the end of the day it’s only a few people involved anyway, and it’s really not that different.”

You can watch our interview with Porter at the top of the page.

Echo is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu and will leave Hulu on April 9th.