Tony Dalton’s Jack Duquesne hasn’t unsheathed his sword for the last time, teases Marvel’s Hawkeye executive producer Trinh Tran. Appearing on making-of documentary special Marvel Studios’ Assembled: The Making of Hawkeye, Tran says the end of the Marvel Studios series allows for future appearances of the socialite swordsman. Hawkeye left off with Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) joining forces with Duquesne against his ex-fiancée — Kate’s mother, Eleanor Bishop (Vera Farmiga) — after she’s exposed for her criminal business dealings with the Tracksuit Mafia and Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), the Kingpin.
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“With Jack’s character, we wanted him to be the red herring,” Tran said of Kate’s would-be step-father, framed for the murder of his wealthy uncle Armand Duquesne III (Simon Callow). “We wanted people to really question whether or not he is acting as a sort of like a buffoon this entire time, or is he really faking it?”
In the comics, the master swordsman mentored a young Clint Barton. The dashing swashbuckler was a costumed supervillain turned superhero, appearing as an archenemy of Hawkeye’s before later joining The Avengers.
“We really wanted to bring in Jack Duquesne, who in the comics is supposed to be Swordsman, and Swordsman in the comics is Clint Barton’s mentor. He taught Clint how to do archery and really is also a villain in the end,” Tran said. “We wanted to explore that character, bring him into the series, but wanted a different twist to it.”
Dalton’s Jack is a skilled fencer, dueling Kate in a playful match where “Kate does this one little smart move on him that he deflects.”
“We wanted to leave his character at the end as a mystery. And that will actually allow a lot more opportunities down the line if we want to explore Swordsman in the MCU,” Tran said of his expert swordsmanship.
Added Dalton of the character created by Stan Lee and Don Heck in the pages of the classic The Avengers, “My brother got me all these comic books about the Swordsman that were printed all these years back. So I just kinda got into it, see what this guy was like, and it was sort of this swashbuckler kind of Erol Flynn-type of character. So I tried to kind of instill that a little bit into the character, this sort of debonair, kind of very classy sort of kind of guy.”
All episodes of Marvel’s Hawkeye are now streaming on Disney+.
