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This week’s upcoming Supergirl movie starring Milly Alcock and directed by Craig Gillespie isn’t entirely adapted from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s famed graphic novel, per se, but it’s heavily influenced by it. And if you’ve ever cracked open Woman of Tomorrow and its sci-fi, space-opera riff on True Grit, it’s easy to see why.
Even Milly Alcock admits to being blown away when she first devoured the book in preparation—and on social media—for Supergirl.
“It’s such a visceral world, it’s so vivid, and I was so seduced by the colors and the imagery of the world Tom King and Bilquis Evely presented,” Alcock tells us when we catch up in Beverly Hills. “Also the story was so surprising, I did not expect to read a comic book and find this messy, resilient, and incredibly kind person within the book.”
That emphasis on messy, and kind, is the recipe Alcock, Gillespie, and screenwriter Ana Nogueira are specifically following for a Supergirl movie that feels distinct from many other caped movies out there. While the marketing has obviously emphasized the space adventure aspect of the tale, which echoes producer James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy at Marvel Studios, the actual Kara Zor-El film has a fairly somber and wistful tone.
The colors of Evely’s pages were eschewed in favor of a grungier, faintly dystopian aesthetic by Gillespie—whose vision has been compared not unfairly to Mad Max—but the core narrative of the book remains: a disaffected and traumatized superheroine gets roped into a road-trip journey with a young girl named Ruthye (Eve Ridley) after Ruthye’s family is slain by a space brigand. One element that especially carries over is witnessing the action from Ruthye’s POV.
Nogueira tells us framing the set pieces this way was another Gillespie choice, but the broader sense of adapting the graphic novel’s narrative with a child’s perspective was something the screenwriter brought to the material before a director was ever attached.
“It’s because Kara doesn’t feel extraordinary in her own life,” Nogueira explains about the two-hander nature of the story. “She feels like she’s less than, but in the eyes of this little girl she is the most incredible being Ruthye has ever come across, and so it was important to see Kara through the eyes of that child, and hopefully Kara can eventually see herself through the eyes of that child and learn to love herself and accept this mantle that feels so large.”
Indeed, Alcock reveals to us and Nogueira both that her favorite scene in the book is a simple sequence where King’s prose takes a backseat and Evely meticulously draws across two pages Kara teaching Ruthye, a provincial from a planet that is a cross between the Old West and feudal Japan, how to use running water.
“My favorite scene within the comic book is the scene where Kara teaches Ruthye how to wash her hands,” Alcock says. “That broke my heart, because it gave me such an insight into this person who has such extremities to care for others, I just adored it.”
An appreciation for the source material seems acute on this one, though, with co-star Jason Momoa getting to live his own adolescent fantasy by at last playing Lobo, the space-biker bounty hunter. Technically Lobo isn’t in King and Evely’s Woman of Tomorrow, but it proved true to another comic fan’s vision.
“I remember the walls of my comic book store in Iowa, and I remember being there with a friend who was the guy who introduced me to everything,” Momoa muses. “I don’t remember which one I got first. At that time I just bought a bunch of stuff, and it was just tons and tons of comic books.”
The ones featuring Lobo cumulatively left an impression on the Hawaiian actor, too, who originally lobbied to play the bounty hunter years ago before being cast instead as Aquaman in Zack Snyder’s version of the DC Universe in the 2010s. And it was also Momoa who directly texted James Gunn when news first trickled out that Gunn was probably rebooting the DCU in this decade. Much of the iconography we associate with Lobo—the motorcycle, the cigar, the leather—is here, as are elements that the actor invented wholecloth, such as giving Lobo basically metal talons on his fingers.
“It’s just more weapons,” says Momoa. “I think it’s just fun to be able to rip someone’s face off with claws. He’s got the fangs and everything, he’s just a big beast…. he’s a Grizzly Bear.”
Momoa seems to be a genuine fan of the material. When we even mention an infamous comic book story wherein Lobo is hired by the Easter Bunny, the actor interjects “to kill Santa Claus” before we finish our sentence. With that said, he’s not sure his Lobo would take that job.
“I mean, it’s tough to say. I like Santa Claus,” Momoa laughs. “I’m a fan of the character. But sure, I think there should be something funny in there, and Santa should definitely be in there, and I should definitely give him the eye.”
Of course not everything that works in a comic book works in a movie and vice versa. Some of this is due to commercial considerations, such as the fact that while Tom King’s Kara swears like a sailor, Alcock’s is only permitted one F-bomb in a PG-13 rating. Hence why they shot multiple scenes where Alcock dropped the four-letter word, leaving choices in the final edit.
“I had a favorite but it didn’t get in, it didn’t make the final cut,” Alcock sighs with a chuckle. “I can’t say what it is, because it might spoil things, but yeah, I had a favorite, and it didn’t make it in.”
It’s apparently the same as Nogueira’s, who half-jokingly teases that maybe on the Blu-ray they will include “all the F-bombs that we had.”
Other elements that are left out of the film are, perhaps, more fantastical, such as Supergirl’s winged Pegasus-like horse who can soar through the cosmos, Comet. Then again, while the magical steed (and his shockingly complex backstory) is not in Supergirl, the screenwriter doesn’t rule out the possibility of revisiting the character down the road.
“The Comet situation,” explains the screenwriter, “needs its own [story]—the reason it’s not here is there are certain things you need to move away from, but they need their own run to let the rest of the audience know about him.”
Perhaps in another movie Kara can form her own team of super-pets with Krypto the Super-Dog and Comet the Space Horse?
Supergirl is in theaters on Friday, June 26.
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