Brad Winderbaum: ‘A beautiful echo through time’

"Echo, the 10th series in the MCU, explores the compelling backstory of Maya Lopez and her standalone journey."

The earliest ideas for Echo —the 10th series in the MCU — Brad Winderbaum says, started on the set of Hawkeye. “She was an antagonist in that series,” says Winderbaum over a video call from Beverly Hills, California. “She had such a compelling back-story and history, that it felt like it was the grounds to build a great story. Add Alaqua Cox , who is unbelievably dynamic on screen, to the mix and we realised that this was a show we wanted to make.”

Casting Maya Lopez for Hawkeye was a long and exhaustive search, says Winderbaum, who is one of the executive producers on Echo. “It was important that the actor could act (laughs), was native, and deaf. That was already a needle to thread, but our incredible casting director, Sarah Finn and her team cast a wide net across the country.”

It just so happened, Winderbaum says, that the best actor for the role, Alaqua Cox, was all those things. “And she had one leg, could ride a motorcycle, and was a martial artist. She was unapologetically amazing and incredible to watch on screen. We were extremely fortunate that she found her way to us.”

Echo is part of Phase Five of the MCU and the first series under the Marvel Spotlight banner. “Just like in the comic books, Marvel Spotlight represents a standalone story,” says Winderbaum. “It was important for a show like Echo to stand on its own feet. We wanted to present it in a way where you didn’t expect The Avengers to show up or have a tie-in to the multiverse.”

One can watch Echo as an independent piece on its own terms with little to no knowledge of the rest of the MCU, Winderbaum says. “The Spotlight banner is a door for new fans to come in. Maya still lives in the same world as all our other characters and you never know where she can pop up in the future. As a series, however, Echo is a standalone piece of work.”

Part of the decision to binge drop Echo, Winderbaum says was to make it feel like an independent piece. “Binge dropping has, however, been part of the conversation since the beginning of Marvel producing shows for Disney+. We’ve been thinking about what the best show to binge drop would be for a long time and because Echo has such a cliffhanger-y nature and pulls you into each episode in such a dynamic way, it was clear that it was the perfect candidate for a binge drop.”

Winderbaum has been quoted as saying the series will have street-level stakes. “The Marvel Universe is so vast that we can all work for the rest of our careers producing television shows, movies and animated shows and never get to every single corner of this amazing, intricate, interwoven, fictional space. A show like Echo is driving at a specific, grittier, more grounded corner of our universe that audiences are yearning for and will enjoy.”