SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details from the first three episodes of Marvel‘s Ironheart.
Dominique Thorne returns as Riri Williams in Marvel’s Ironheart, giving audiences a much closer look at the 19-year-old tech wiz than her introduction in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was able to offer.
Thorne says viewers met Riri “in a real fight or flight type situation” when she was recruited by Shuri (Letitia Wright) to help protect Wakanda from intervening world powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s (Chadwick Boseman) death — and that provided plenty of welcome distraction from her own life. That’s certainly not the case anymore, as Riri is sent back home to Chicago after being expelled from MIT at the beginning of Ironheart.
“Now she’s taking that experience and this opening of her worldview back with her to her hometown,” Thorne said. “[She’s] being forced to confront the truth of her internal life and to answer some of the questions that really only come up when we take the time to go back home. Riri is realizing that it’s only by answering those questions that she’s going to ever be able to get what she actually wants, which is to be who she knows she can be.”
Riri is nothing if not confident in her own capacity for success. She knows her worth, and she is not going to let anyone take that away from her. Even when she’s expelled from college, she vows to find new ways to finance her super suit (which she’s been building to emulate Tony Stark’s using grant and research money), rather than bend to anyone else’s will.
Little does she know, that commitment to her own genius will require her to confront other parts of herself that she’s not quite as ready to, like her overwhelming grief from losing her dad and her best friend, Natalie, in a drive-by shooting. Or, the weight of the responsibility she’s beginning to feel as she gets tied up in literal universe-saving endeavors.
“I think some of the episodes begin a necessary conversation or acknowledgement about…what it looks like to leave those emotions or experiences unacknowledged or unaddressed, and the levels of anxiety that that brings out,” Thorne explained. “I think when we think about someone in this genius space, we don’t necessarily associate that genius with this type of vulnerability, but seeing and finding those moments to have Riri really be confronted with and really have to sit with the weight of her emotions and decide which moments, ‘yeah, she can’t run from this,’ or ‘there is no shaking off this one,’ I think that was probably the where the challenge came in, for sure, wanting to strike a balance.”
Although it’s been nearly three years since the release of Wakanda Forever, the events in Ironheart take place shortly after. Upon returning to school and promptly being expelled for completing other students’ assignments in exchange for money, Riri takes off (suit and all) for Chicago and starts brainstorming ways to continue funding her suit without the backing of a major university.
Things start out messy and just keep getting messier when Riri accidentally creates an AI model for her suit using the likeness of her late best friend. Naturally, that triggers a lot of previously unaddressed emotions for Riri to work through as she grapples with this new version of her friend, who looks and sounds like Natalie and shares all her memories but is actually a robot.
“It’s tough. It almost feels like she’s been running from this for as long as she could. We meet her at MIT, and she is not at all concerned with any of this. But then she finds herself in Wakanda and being forced to also acknowledge the grief that exists there, and to work with them, to exist alongside them, moving through that, and also kind of playing a role in them having to shoulder new grief with the loss of Queen Ramonda,” Thorne said. “So that happens, she goes back to school, back at MIT, trying to move forward. That didn’t work out. So now we find her back home, and there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nowhere else to run. She is in her childhood bedroom. She’s hanging out with her childhood friends, her the brother of her deceased best friend. She’s surrounded by all of these parts of her life that she tried to leave behind because that grief was so heavy.”
While previously it might have been pretty easy for Riri to decide that grief was “not at all something that she wanted to spend her time wrapped up in,” she’s got nowhere left to run in Ironheart, Thorne continued.
“On the one hand, [running] has absolutely led to her leaning in even heavier and advancing even farther when it came to the technological risks that she was willing to take. We see in Episode 1, she’s like, ‘You know what? What do I have to lose?’ She needs to get to the other side of these discoveries. So she’s willing to test it out on herself, if that’s what she needs to do to get there,” Thorne added. “It’s a little bit like one step forward, two steps back. For as long as she chooses to ignore this necessary conversation within herself, she can continue to step forward with her tech and her advancements. But she’s always going to feel that resistance until, of course, we see her really relinquish and give in in some moments and get to the other side of healing.”
Pretty quickly upon her return to Chicago, Riri teams up with The Hood (Anthony Ramos) and his band of thieves who have been blackmailing giant tech corporations for money. But, by the end of Episode 3, it’s clear that this is likely to lead her down a dark path.
Viewers will have to wait for more on where Ironheart is headed, as the final three episodes of the miniseries drop on Disney+ July 1. While there are likely to be consequences for future MCU projects, as there almost always are in these series, Thorne says she’s been focused on the opportunity to dig deep into this character, which is her first role that recurs over multiple projects.
Concludes Thorne: “When we got to this part of the journey [after Wakanda Forever], it was really just about leaning in and continuing to ask the hard and uncomfortable questions and make sure that Riri was just as unapologetic about going to those more intimate places as she has been about the belief she has in the tech that she creates.”
