Disney’s upcoming super hero streaming series Ironheart, is set to bring a queer drag queen character to the Marvel universe of super heroes shows on the Children-friendly Disney+ platform.
The series, which follows Ri Ri Williams (Dominique Thorne) as she creates her ironman-like supersuit to fight evil, will also feature Marvel’s first drag queen character starring Ru Paul’s Drag Race contestant Shea Couleé, who will portray a computer hacker and drag queen codenamed “Slug.”
The drag queen, whose real name is Jaren Merrell, is a Chicago-based entertainer who competed on several seasons of Drag Race, excitedly told Entertainment Weekly that his character is a socialist-styled “Robin Hood” who steals from the “privileged” to “give back to the community.”
“I help a group of urban Robin Hoods to take away from the privileged and help give back to the community,” he told the magazine. “I’m there to help out on all the missions that go down, trying to shift this power dynamic in this version of Chicago we see in the show.”
Merrell added that the character’s past includes a time spent as a drag queen, and that the character goes by the pronouns “They/Them.”
“They’ve kind of left drag. They are a drag queen, but it’s kind of a past life,” Merrell explains. “You see them in drag, but it’s kind of in the context of flashbacks before where they are now, because they’re trying to be on the low-low!”
Merrell also praised the Marvel producers for helping to craft the drag queen character to fit his personality and lifestyle.
“Finding ways to exist in a way that felt truly, authentically me — and also to the character — was really cool,” Shea reflects of her time fusing her acting talents with a genuine affection for Slug as a character,” Merrell said.
Ironheart is one Marvel production that has bounced around in production purgatory since 2018, going from a canceled theatrical release to finally a six-episode streaming series debuting this month. Even the series has been long in production. Some footage was shown at Disney’s D23 as far back as 2022. It was also scheduled to premiere in 2023, then pushed back to 2024, and now is finally seeing the light of day this month. The small six-episode order is also seen as a sign that Disney just wanted to get the whole thing over with.
The series marks the final project of the somewhat disastrous MCU Phase Five schedule, which suffered from lackluster ticket sales, low TV ratings, and accusations of wild-eyed wokeness. And Ironheart looks like it will be one of the most woke Marvel product yet.
Marvel has weathered criticism from the far-left, LGBTQ+ community for avoiding putting much emphasis on gay characters. As far back as 2019, Marvel Studios promised to start adding more gay superheroes and characters in the MCU films. And since then, several gay characters have been introduced in steaming series Loki and Agatha All Along, and films including The Eternals, Deadpool, Thor: Love and Thunder, Black Panther, and others.
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