10 Most Exciting New Faces Coming To The MCU
5. Jeffrey Wright – The Watcher (What If...?)
The “What If…?” series of one shot stories have been a bit of a staple in the Marvel Comics canon since their first publication in 1977. It’s a simple enough concept: a major plot line of the comics is reimagined as if some drastically different choice had been made, and then the repercussions of this are explored. Simple, yes – but it also leads to very interesting results.
What if Gwen Stacey had lived? What if Punisher had killed Daredevil? What if Professor X and Magneto had formed the X Men together? With Marvel’s multiverse, anything is combination of events is possible – and What If…? allowed these alternatives to exist, at least for an issue.
Phase 4’s Disney+ serials includes an animated What If…? show, expected to drop sometime in the middle of next year. Major MCU characters are going to be included, with their original big screen actors reprising their roles.
New to the scene will be the narrator of the series, Uatu the Watcher: an omniscient alien assigned to Earth to - funnily enough - watch its events without interfering in them himself. Cast in the role of the all-seeing being is Westworld’s Jeffrey Wright.
Frankly, there are few people in the world who are blessed with such vocal gravitas, and it’s lucky that Wright is one of them. Uatu is a member of one of the most powerful races in the universe, tasked with observing and recording major events – kind of like an interdimensional national library. That kind of authority needs a commanding voice behind it.
Yet Uatu needs to be recognisably unusual from his fellow Watchers: his interest in Earth goes beyond the purely clinical, as Uatu’s fondness for the planet and its people grows beyond impartiality. His watch is punctuated with joyous amusement at what those funny little creatures clinging to the continents are doing, so his task is one completed with honour, rather than one done out of obligation. As such, a cold, calculating voice just wouldn’t do, which is why it’s a good thing Jeffrey Wright can impart warmth and affection in tandem with that rich, gravelly voice of his.
A lot of the Marvel cast will be new to voice acting, so the animated What If…? Series will create new hurdles for them to navigate. But, with Jeffrey Wright stringing things together as narrator of the show, I’d expect them to manage relatively smooth sailing for the production of this particular project.