While it still isn’t clear when Netflix will deliver Melissa Rosenberg’s A.K.A. Jessica Jones to its comic-loving subscribers, we have a pretty good idea of who we’ll be seeing the kickass detective facing in her first season. If audition videos signify what we think they do, Jones will be targeted once more by Zebediah Killgrave, also known as the Purple Man. Isn’t that grape, er, great?
Awful puns aside, ComicBookMovie detected an audition video where actress Meghan Ory is reading for the role of Jessica, who is called Julia in the video. (Even the auditions used the A.K.A. factor.) In one of several scenes, Ory is talking to a character named “Tracy,” and she’s freaking out over someone named “Kincade” being back and sending clients to her detective agency. She compares the case to own history with “Kincade,” bringing up how he can make people do things, and the dangers of what will happen if he gets a hold of her again.
Sure, Melissa Rosenberg might have come up with a completely new villain named Kincade that terrorized Jessica in some way that isn’t referring to her spell under Purple Man’s command in the comics. But after “Tracy,” whom we’re definitely assuming is Luke Cage, says that she’s better equipped to handle him, she mentions a past failure, saying “that’s what started all of this.” That’s pretty much ex-superhero now-P.I. Jessica Jones’ origin story in a nutshell. If this show posits something other than the Purple Man as the cause of Jones’ fears, that’ll be disconcerting, but it’s still too early in the process to start waving torches. Watch Ory’s entire audition below.
Unfortunately, the second video that CBM posted to strengthen these claims has been removed. In it, they say actor Nick Court was reading the Kincade role, and that it detailed the first meeting between him and Julia/Jessica. That would have been interesting to hear, Internet.
Killgrave seemed likely to make an appearance in Jessica Jones’ first leading role in a major series, given his major ties to her character’s history, but Rosenberg and Netflix have offered up so little information about what fans can expect. Other than “Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones,” that is. And it’s still entirely possible that the villain will only appear in brief antagonistic moments, emerging in full for the Defenders miniseries. I love this “anything can happen” point in a show’s infancy, as opposed to the “boy, they’ll do anything” cynicism of later-season series.
For now, we’ll hope that A.K.A. Jessica Jones is coming in early 2016, by which point I will have watched Daredevil a half-dozen times.
