At Kings Dominion, survival is extra credit — but the heightened reality of Deadly Class is predicated on the idea that Headmaster Lin rules over the school with an iron fist. One of his rules is that while you can use guns in your work, they do not come to school with you.
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Series creator Rick Remender said that while the decision was a practical one — the producers did not want to glamorize guns in school at a time when the United States is dealing with an epidemic of school shootings — they based the reasoning behind the decision on the philosophy and aesthetic of both Deadly Class and Master Lin’s school for the deadly arts.
“The Battle Royale of it all has seeped into our actual existence,” Remender said during a visit to the set of Deadly Class. “It’s no longer fantasy, it’s no longer something that you can look at it through a prism; you’re now living it. And so the heightenedness of the ‘school dealing with assassins’ part frankly works much better without the inclusion of guns. So we’ve cooked in an ideology from Master Lin, where he sees guns as weak and guns as part of the systemic problems of the society. He has a philosophy about that, and just trying to sort of traditional assassin business, stealth and Ninja stuff, and things like that. So the heightened stuff can still be part the danger still there, but we never have to inject any sort of imagery that can bring up the awfulness that we’re actually not seeing in the news.”
That does not mean that guns will not play a role in the series, though; outside of the doors of Kings Dominion, characters — even Kings Dominion students — play by their own rules.
“What’s cool about Willie is, people don’t want to mess with him, because he is his weapon,” said Luke Tennie, who plays Willie in the show. “You know, in the comics, Willie wasn’t that large. I, myself, am 6’3″, 260, and I’m playing a 17 year old, so this is a big kid. No one else is really that size. Nah, nobody’s really trying to mess with Willie, and he’s lucky, because he has his size. He’s also proficient, but as far as the weapons rule, it’s true, but we ain’t always on campus.”
Fans who want to see the episode, which ComicBook.com called one of the best comic book TV pilots ever made, can do so tonight if you haven’t watched it in the weeks since it was released online.
Deadly Class, which IMDb has rated as one of its ten most-anticipated TV shows of 2019, follows a homeless teenager named Marcus (Bejamin Wadsworth) after he is recruited to a boarding school for budding assassins, is based on a comic book written by Rick Remender, who also produces the show. He has said that one of the benefits of TV is that he will get to explore some of the spaces in between stories in the comics, and to elaborate on things that he moved past fairly quickly the first time around.
Deadly Class will debut on SYFY on January 16 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
