Jupiter’s Legacy Stars Josh Duhamel and Leslie Bibb on Playing Superheroes Across a Century

The new superhero series Jupiter’s Legacy is just hours away from premiering on Netflix and will give fans eight episodes of action in the latest franchise from Mark Millar, who also created popular franchises like Kingsman and Kick-Ass before joining the streaming service. The comic series Jupiter’s Legacy was done in collaboration with the iconic artist Frank Quitely, though it also spun off a prequel series called Jupiter’s Circle with artist Wilfredo Torres. With two separate timelines established in the storyline, the new Netflix series also utilizes that format to tell a story of hope separated across two different eras, and how that hope can be broken.

Jupiter’s Legacy stars Josh Duhamel and Leslie Bibb as the two leaders of the Union of Justice known as the Utopian and Lady Liberty. In their civilian alter egos of Sheldon and Grace Sampson, they are the parents to a pair of super-powered young adults facing their own demons as the children of the strongest beings in the world.

Sheldon and Grace are very different people in the 1930s, when they first meet and make a journey that results in them getting superpowers, from the present day when they are established heroes. ComicBook.com caught up with Bibb and Duhamel about the challenges of playing the same characters in two different timelines separated by nearly a century.

“Well, in the beginning [Sheldon] was a guy who was sort of falling something blindly. He was having, he was lost,” said Duhamel. “He literally loses his mind after the death of his father and goes into this crazy psychotic sort of, has these visions that sort of lead them to this Island which ultimately gives them these powers. So, he was able to sort of gain the trust of the people around him because of his blind faith in whatever was out there.”

Duhamel added. “Cut to nine years later, and this is a guy who’s now been running the show for so long and, wears the responsibility and the expectation, and the regret. You just, you can feel it on him. And you know that he’s a guy that’s questioning some of the ways that he’s done it, and have they really affected change? And so that to me was, the most fun to play with was figuring out why, in the beginning, do we go and why did they follow him? And then it’s like, why are they still following him? And what does he need to do to sort of regain that trust and that ability to lead.”

Bibb echoed those sentiments and how the role of Lady Liberty affected her character Grace’s life over the decades.

“When I read this, I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve never looked, I’ve never seen a superhero show where you see people at the beginning and you sort of see them at the end of their lives.’ And you sort of see how much they’ve changed and you will in the show’s journey continue to see them as they age and evolve. And I thought that was an interesting aspect of the show. I like the fact that you see Grace in her young idealistic, kind of no BS, truth seeker that she is. And then you see her as she’s gotten older. And that, I mean, she’s, of course, fearless because she’s a superhero.”

Bibb added, “But I feel like, in her personal life, she has become, a bit, I don’t know if fearful is the right word, but she is trying to keep a lot of balls up in the air. And she is trying to — it’s hard for her. She’s trying to be as fearless as she is at her job as she is with her family and trying to keep it afloat and you’re seeing her and it’s not really working. So, I think by the end of [the season], you sort of see that she needs to go back to the girl that she was and sort of find that voice again that she had when she was, you know, in her twenties.”

Fans will get to see how Lady Liberty and the Utopian deal with an ever-changing world when Jupiter’s Legacy is available to stream on Netflix beginning May 7th.