She-Hulk Director and Mark Ruffalo Tease What's Next for Hulk After Episode 2
Warning: this story contains spoilers for Thursday's She-Hulk Episode 2, "Superhuman Law." "I got some things I gotta take care of," Bruce Banner/Smart Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) told Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) over the phone in Thursday's She-Hulk: Attorney at Law. What Bruce didn't tell his superhero cousin: he answered the call from space, following up on the Sakaaran spaceship that caused the car crash that exposed Jen to a dose of Banner's blood — turning her into a green 6-foot-7-inch hulk lawyer. In an interview with Marvel.com, the cast and creators of She-Hulk teased answers about Hulk's return trip to Sakaar, the alien planet where Banner crash landed in between the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron and Thor: Ragnarok.
"The point of that [scene] was always to have people's jaw drop and tune into the next episode," said Kat Coiro, who directed the series premiere and She-Hulk Episode 2. Banner's space trip is the first scene Ruffalo filmed for She-Hulk, which started with a flashback origin story that saw Jen's Avenger cousin teach her how to Hulk.
"[Smart Hulk in the spaceship] is where you really feel the weirdness of creating a CGI world because it was Mark in the suit at a little fold-up table on a fold-out chair without even a proper camera shooting him," Coiro explained. "But he's so engaged and he knows the drill and he made the scene alive even in that circumstance, in a big box with fluorescent lights."
As for whether the teaser is setting up World War Hulk with Smart Hulk's devolution into the savage World Breaker, head writer Jessica Gao isn't telling. "We don't explain it, because it's She-Hulk's show," Gao said with a laugh, teasing that audiences have only seen "a little sliver of what he was up to" during Hulk's time in space in Ragnarok.
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For now, Ruffalo is excited to explore more of the big green guy after Banner melded the Hulk-Banner identities to become his "fully-integrated self" during the Blip's five-year time jump in Avengers: Endgame.
"This begins to tease out the possibilities of that, maybe one day exploring it more deeply. Like, how does he use the bathroom? How does he sleep in his bed? All of these fun things that we get to explore here," Ruffalo said. "It is really interesting and intriguing to me and fun to do."
Starring Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, Jameela Jamil as Titania, Ginger Gonzaga as Nikki Ramos, Josh Segarra as Augustus "Pug" Pugliese, Jon Bass as Todd, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Mallory Book, Tim Roth as the Abomination, and Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Smart Hulk, new episodes of Marvel Studios' She-Hulk: Attorney at Law are streaming Thursdays on Disney+.