One of the most bizarre things to happen in Marvel’s What If…? saw Darcy Lewis and Howard the Duck get married in Las Vegas during the seventh episode, which saw Thor descend on Midgard to throw a party the likes of which the Nine Realms had never seen before.
It was a completely unexpected development in a series based entirely on giving audiences stories they could never have imagined, and fans will be hoping that we get to see the newlyweds again in Season 2. Marvel even leaned into the buzz by releasing an in-canon wedding invitation, so the company knows that the nuptials struck a chord with audiences.
In a new interview with Collider, lead writer A.C. Bradley and director Bryan Andrews explained how they came up with such a bonkers plot development, with Bradley revealing that alcohol was unsurprisingly involved.
“When you’re making an animation show and you do temp voices called scratch voices, where you put the storyboards and the rough voices against to see how everything plays before you get in Hayley Atwell and Kat Dennings and all the MCU actors. I can’t act, but if you give me a beer I do a very good Darcy Lewis. Because it turns out drunk A.C. and Darcy are kind of the same.
So my original scratch was recorded in the edit bay after a couple of shots of whiskey with the crew. And I also love Howard the Duck. I also have a slight crush on Seth Green, because we all watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer as teenagers. And so that came from a bunch of running jokes in both the script, in the edit bay, with some alcohol, with is really how the Darcy/Howard relationship sprang anyway.”
An episode revolving around an intergalactic rager presented plenty of storytelling opportunities, with Andrews admitting that it made complete sense when they began drafting up the guest list.
“Yeah, it just came a bit organically, too, because even when we were doing Party Thor and the universe comes, we’re just like, ‘Yeah, of course, Howard’s going to be there. Of course. It’s Vegas. He’s in this suit. He has a martini, and he’s in Vegas for sure’. Right? And then the combo of the two, then each little thing, it’s just meant to be. It just came, and it’s perfect, so the fact that audiences are responding to that makes us really happy because we’ve loved that forever and haven’t been able to talk about to anybody, and now we can say, ‘Isn’t that amazing?’. They just seem made for each other. I don’t know why. It’s great. We love it.”
Marvel’s What If…? packed in plenty of talking points throughout its nine-episode first season, but few came out of the blue quite like a scientist getting hitched to an anthropomorphized duck from outer space.
