But She-Hulk is a bombshell. She is also the alter ego of Jennifer Walters, a meek public interest attorney with a listless dating life and a passion for workplace separates. When Jen receives an accidental transfusion from her cousin Bruce Banner (Marvel’s original Hulk, played by Mark Ruffalo), she suddenly becomes She-Hulk. While Bruce’s Hulk is a cinder block of a man – or as Maslany put it, “a roided-out gym maniac, to such a cartoonish degree” – Jen’s transformation, triggered by anger, looks different. Only some muscles bulge. Her breasts (not muscles!) bulge too. Her waist whittles. Her hair straightens.

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“She fulfils the stereotypical feminine ideal body, while still being, like, too tall and green,” Maslany said. (This was not lost on viewers of the She-Hulk trailer, who criticised the character’s voluptuous proportions.)

Despite sometimes playing four clones in a single scene, Maslany has never transformed in quite this way. And if she knows she looks good in green, it’s because she once dressed up as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle at a comic-con. But she gets what it’s like to have the world suddenly see you differently. And if she doesn’t understand her talent as a superpower, her colleagues do.

“She has so many superpowers,” said Jessica Gao, who wrote She-Hulk.

Raised in a medium-size town in Saskatchewan, Maslany was never that interested in fame. “There was, like, absolute flying in the opposite direction, doing everything to not end up there,” she said. She loved acting. She was less enthusiastic about the accoutrements of celebrity. At one point, I referred to a fashion shoot she had done.

“I’m getting better at it,” she said, making a face.

But she did become reasonably famous. So Jen’s resistance to becoming She-Hulk resonated with her. “The idea of being a superhero is not appealing to me,” Jen said. Maslany didn’t have to imagine how she would feel if she became a public figure practically overnight, if she were scrutinised for her appearance and affect.

“It’s a very easy jump for me,” she said.

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On the red carpet and in media appearances, she plays a role to make it through. “It has to be another character, or else it costs me too much,” she said.

This helps to explain why an actress who would have sworn that she would never do something as mainstream as a superhero show signed on. “I didn’t want to do anything of that scale ever,” she said. “But there was something about the script that felt really weird and funny in a way that was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know why, but it’s undeniable to me.’” (Actually, she did deny it, in at least one interview, but she explained that as a contractual matter: She couldn’t announce it until Disney announced it first.)

The move surprised Helen Shaver, a director who worked with Maslany on Orphan Black. But it didn’t surprise her for long. “I was like, ‘OK, that’s a wild choice’,” Shaver said on a recent call. “But I also know she has this playful, wacky element to her as well. She is willing to abandon herself to madcap humour.”

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The shoot began in the spring of 2021, in Atlanta. As Jen, Maslany played a version of herself, although she noted that she has never worn more makeup to play a supposedly mousy character. “I’m truly wearing full lashes,” she said. “I’m contoured to hell. The story around Jen being undesirable is absurd.” And because Jen retains her consciousness even in superhero form, She-Hulk is a version of her, too, although one achieved almost entirely by digital effects.

When She-Hulk appears at her sexiest, Maslany is slinking around the set in a silver motion-capture suit and a helmet. “I feel like a little kid in pyjamas,” she said.

Yet Ginger Gonzaga, who plays Nikki, Jen’s spirited paralegal, could always tell whom she was acting opposite. “When she’s She-Hulk, she has this physicality that instantly changes, and it happens very fast,” Gonzaga said. “It’s a proud stance and a statuesque stance.”

Maslany described She-Hulk’s bearing as heavier, less fidgety, more centred in the pelvis. “The weight of She-Hulk brings her down into her loins in a different way,” she said. This might be the way a woman moved if she felt safe in the world, if she knew that no one could hurt her.

But She-Hulk suggests a further fantasy, one that has nothing to do with irradiated blood and is arguably even more incredible than the sci-fi imaginings of Orphan Black. This new show suggests that a woman could be angry and that the world would really like it.

I asked Maslany about the last time she felt angry. “It’s never not there,” she said. But she rarely allows herself to express it in her personal life. And it never looks as good on her – “I would love to be able to be angry but not, like, shaking and crying,” she said – as it does on She-Hulk.

“She transforms into a hyperbeautiful, hyperfeminine version that might be more palatable in that anger,” Maslany said as she stepped off the bridge and into the muddle of Manhattan. “It’s wild. It’s super wild.”

She-Hulk is on Disney+.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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