Butterfly Stars Tease How Title Meaning Is Different From the Graphic Novel

“My name was Becky then. And in the CIA, my name was Rebecca Faulkner,” the deep-cover agent says in the first issue of Butterfly. “But in the Project, we don’t have names. Though sometimes… they’ll call me Butterfly.” Created by screenwriter Arash Amel (The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) and written by Marguerite Bennet (Marvel’s A-Force) with art by Antonio Fuso (The Girl Who Played with Fire) and Stefano Simeone (Radiant Black), the four-issue BOOM! Studios graphic novel tells the story of Butterfly, an agent of Project Delta who has her cover blown when she’s set up for a Russian oligarch’s murder.

When coordinates lead Butterfly to a vineyard in Beaujolais, France, she comes across “Nightingale,” the code name of who Project agents believe to be a burned operative, a boogeyman, a myth. Here’s the first-issue twist, after the SPOILER ALERT:

Nightingale is Butterfly’s estranged father, ex-Project agent David Faulker, who faked his death 20 years earlier and became a “private contractor” for Bridgewell Ldt. Once she’s reunited with her father, Butterfly — spy, killer, daughter — must decide whether to seek answers with the Project or believe the man who betrayed her years ago.

In the new spy-thriller series Butterfly (Aug. 13 on Prime Video), Daniel Dae Kim (Hawaii Five-0, Avatar: The Last Airbender) plays David Jung, an enigmatic, highly unpredictable former US intelligence operative living in South Korea. David’s life is blown to pieces when the consequences of an impossible decision from his past comes back to haunt him, and he finds himself pursued by Rebecca (The Flash‘s Reina Hardesty), a deadly, sociopathic young agent assigned to kill him, and Caddis, the sinister spy organization she works for.

“You let me grow up thinking that you’d been killed,” Hardesty’s Rebecca says in the trailer, above. “Disappearing was the only way I could keep you safe,” David tells his daughter, who was trained by the DIA’s Juno Lund (Piper Perabo) to be Caddis’ most valuable asset.

Once it’s revealed that David is alive, Juno orders the ex-Caddis agents be eliminated. “They know all our secrets,” she says. “I don’t care who you have to bribe, torture or kill. We have to take them out.”

That’s the gist of the graphic novel, a globe-spanning story that takes place in Virginia, France, and Somalia. Prime Video’s Butterfly relocates the action to South Korea, and in spy-thriller fashion, the code name “Butterfly” has a secret meaning.

“It’s simple in the graphic novel. ‘Butterfly’ is Rebecca, [my character’s] codename as a spy. But that’s not what it is in our show,” Hardesty teased during a visit to ComicBook’s San Diego Comic-Con suite. To find out the new meaning behind the show’s title, “You’ll just have to watch.”

“All of us read the source material and all of us are very respectful and really like Arash and the rest of the team’s work,” Kim, who also serves as executive producer, added of the graphic novel. “I think there were certain things that we had to change based on my appearance. And so we asked if it would be possible to change some things like the race, and the setting, and some of the story points.”

“Thankfully, they were really open to it,” the Lost alum continued. “They said, ‘Use this as a foundation and then run with it.’” But like the graphic novel, Butterfly is a character-driven spy thriller that explores complex family dynamics within the treacherous world of global espionage.

All six episodes of Butterfly are streaming August 13 on Prime Video.