Hawkeye Head Writer Jonathan Igla Breaks Down the First Two Episodes - Collider.com

Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) is hoping to spend a quiet and uneventful Christmas with his family, but those plans get derailed quickly when his path crosses with that of Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), a skilled archer who has her own personal history with Hawkeye.

The series also promises to follow up on the aftermath of the MCU film Black Widow, which saw Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) being mistakenly led to believe that Clint was responsible for Natasha Romanoff's (Scarlett Johansson) death on Vormir.

There were a few things that, I would say, we mostly learned about what was going on on some of the other shows by pitching ideas and being told.

And then, with some of the other things, it was a little bit of me sort of putting in requests where I thought they were sensible.

But I thought doing a show about Clint as Natasha's best friend dealing with her loss, there were going to be some things in Black Widow that were worth us knowing about anyway?

So, really, the short answer is we didn't know a ton, but when things were directly relevant to us we would find out, we would be told.

Or if we thought that something would be really directly relevant to us, then I would seek out some answers and sometimes be able to get them, and sometimes not.

That ends up being not as important in the series as I initially thought it might be, but in the comic books that, obviously, heavily influenced the series that everybody at Marvel loves, that I love so much, the Matt Fraction/David Aja run.

Initially telling that story again that we are so familiar with, but from a totally different point of view, from young Kate's point of view, was also a way that I thought I could establish a convention of jumping back and forth a little bit in time and seeing things from different perspectives — which again, didn't end up being a big narrative part of the show, but was part of my initial thoughts.

And he's talking to that waitress, and she sort of challenges him to think hard about the order that some of these things that he thought were coincidental had happened in.

I know you're probably going to get asked so much about Rogers: The Musical, which is honestly delightful in so many ways, but one of the things that struck me watching it was the very quiet moment we get of Clint clearly missing Natasha, even with all the hilarity and the grand spectacle of this stage musical.

Is that something that we're going to see throughout these episodes, more of these little moments of him still mourning that loss.

I'm always interested in really imagining what it's like to live in that world.

I feel like you're going to have to anticipate that people, at some point, are really going to want to see this musical happen in real life.

I want to talk about the plotline that brings Kate and Clint together, which is Kate stealing and wearing the Ronin suit and getting caught on camera?

It seemed like a really visual way to illustrate Clint's past as Ronin kind of resurrecting itself.

IGLA: A series that is going to tell the story of Kate Bishop getting to meet and team up with her childhood hero is going to rely on some sort of an event to bring them together, and probably a coincidence.

Kate has a really good reason to go down the steps in that hotel to that black-market auction?

For Clint, [it's] that moment of seeing the Ronin suit on TV, especially paired with his kids' reaction of like, "Look how cool this is." Lila thinks that it's awesome that the ninja saved that dog, which, in a small way, was important to plant in Clint's mind, that the person wearing that costume may not be a bad guy, which obviously he quickly realizes?

And that moment of seeing the Ronin costume pop up again is exactly the nightmare that has woken Clint up since he thought that it was dead and buried?

What was the process behind figuring out what that was going to look like and basically distilling it down to the series of events that probably contributed to it?

IGLA: Part of the thought process behind the whole idea was that I wanted to feel — because Clint is a guy without superpowers, he's in great shape, and he knows how to take a punch, but there is a lasting impact on his life from all of the blows that he has taken over the years.

And we just wanted to remind the audience of the scale of things that he has been through, partly in contrast to the scale of the challenge that it feels like he's facing now?

So it felt like a series of things that led up to that.

Kate and Clint's first conversation at her apartment feels like it's really the scene that defines their relationship from the jump.

We wrote the show knowing that she was Kate Bishop.

I mean, Hailee's absolutely perfect casting for Kate Bishop

Based on the story you're trying to tell, why did she feel like the right character to end up working with the Tracksuit Bros