Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has been around the superhero block a few times before. The actor took on the role of Arthur Curry’s archnemesis Black Manta in DC’s “Aquaman” films in 2018 and 2023 — and between those, he starred as another DC character, Doctor Manhattan, in HBO’s “Watchmen,” winning an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie.
So when Abdul-Mateen got the opportunity to play for the other team and inhabit a Marvel hero in Andrew Guest and Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Wonder Man,” he had a big request: Slow down on the superpowered antics.
“I had a great time making ‘Aquaman’ but at the same time, I had this experience where I was a human in this world, but my character never got a sip of water,” he said. “I had been chasing Aquaman all over the freaking globe underwater and over water and all of this stuff. Aquaman is chugging his beers and eating his burgers and everything. I told Destin, ‘Man, I want to play a character who can have a beer and a burger,’ and he knew exactly what I meant.”
Marvel Comics has long aimed to depict “the world outside your window,” as Stan Lee often called it, putting superheroes in real settings like New York and using them to tackle modern conversations (such as the civil rights movement in the 1960s in “The X-Men” or post-9/11 America in “Civil War”).
“I thought that Marvel humanized their characters really well,” Abdul-Mateen said. “The Marvel world tended to look like the world that I saw when I went outside, and I said, ‘OK, I think that makes it a bit worthwhile.’”
But “Wonder Man,” to his point, takes this concept to the extreme more than most Marvel Studios projects. Rather than being a show about the superheroics of Simon Williams (a character created by Lee, Jack Kirby and Don Heck in 1964’s “The Avengers #9”), it focuses entirely on his exploits as an actor trying to break through in Hollywood.
Abdul-Mateen portrays Simon as a man at war with himself. The character hides his superhuman abilities from the world, fearing that Hollywood regulations against powered individuals would keep him from his dream job.
“Simon is after a safe place to tell the truth, and I believe that acting turned out to be the safest place for him to do that,” Abdul-Mateen said. “It’s the closest that he can get to telling the truth, to understanding how humans are, understanding how he is, expressing how he feels in a true way. That’s not only why he is an actor, that’s why Simon is the type of actor that he is.”
Throughout the Disney+ series, Simon fights for the lead role in a Hollywood reboot of a film from his childhood (also titled “Wonder Man,” in a very meta story). He befriends veteran actor Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who is secretly being used as an informant to prove Simon has powers and is a public threat.
“Simon’s biggest fear isn’t that his powers would show up at the wrong time,” he said. “His biggest fear was that his light wasn’t as bright as he thought it was. All of the no’s made him feel as if his light was dim, to the point where he’s in the car saying, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe it’s never going to be me.’”
Much of “Wonder Man’s” humor stems from the odd-couple pairing of Trevor and Simon. Kingsley’s character (who previously appeared in “Iron Man 3” and Cretton’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) is beyond aloof, an elder statesman looking to start the next phase of his acting career after being left behind. Simon, meanwhile, steers too far into the other direction, an actor so obsessed with marginalia and textual breakdowns that he loses gigs for being overeager.
The series, filmed primarily in Los Angeles, will feel familiar to many artists hoping to get their big breaks in Hollywood. Abdul-Mateen said Simon’s journey reminds him of his own after he graduated with an MFA from Yale around 10 years before “Wonder Man’s” release.
“A decade ago, I was somewhere in school hoping — knowing — that I had a lot of talent and a lot of passion and something to say. I’d go to the movies, I’d watch them on the screen and I’d say, ‘I can do that, man. I can do that.’ And I knew that nobody on this huge planet knew who the heck I was. I was not even a blip on the radar—just some guy in a small room in New Haven, Connecticut, with a dream. I knew that once I got out there into the big world, I had something to show. I just needed a shot. That’s what I related to the most.
“Then I realized that some of those feelings, they never go away.”
The feelings didn’t even dissipate after Abdul-Mateen won his Emmy for “Watchmen” at a pandemic-era virtual ceremony. While he is grateful to be recognized by his peers, he noted that the experience helped him recognize that external approval “would not be the thing that filled me up” as a performer.
“It didn’t give me any sense of validation because I had already done that work, and I was proud of it even before I received the award,” he said. “In fact, what the Emmy did was it left me with a dream. That dream was to go to the Emmys.”
This story first ran in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
