Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is the worst kind of actor one can be. Sure, he’s talented; he frequently blows casting agents out of the water on the strength of his auditions, with a mind that instantly catalogs every movie he’s seen and every performance within it. But all that means nothing if he can’t get out of his own way.
Simon’s a textbook overthinker, self-conscious to the point of self-obsession. He books small roles in big productions, but loses them just as quickly by requesting presumptive changes to the script. He can’t connect to a character without creating a convoluted backstory that hurts as much as it helps. And perhaps worst of all, he’s suppressing potent, energy-based superpowers, powers that — thanks to a discriminative stipulation called “The Doorman Clause” — legally prevent him from auditioning for most major Hollywood productions. A minor mood swing can trigger a seismic event to rival a baby earthquake. And as a guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve, Simon could probably level the city of Los Angeles without even flinching. In any other Marvel project, he’d be standing toe-to-toe with Thor, the God of Thunder. That his powers feel more like a pesky inconvenience is what plucks Wonder Man out of this franchise’s stuffy self-seriousness and into the realm of an absurdist sitcom.
Wonder Man is unlike any offering from Marvel that’s come before. Bafflingly, it’s leagues better than it has any right to be. A winking satire of show business, superhero fatigue, and the artifice of secret identity shouldn’t work within the MCU at all — yet it does, and does so perfectly. That’s largely a credit to Destin Daniel Cretton, who returns after helming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to double down on his affinity for intimate drama. Wonder Man is a damn-near perfect marriage between sympathetic character study and an offbeat superhero origin — but it is above all (and most successfully) a classic buddy comedy.
All those disparate themes crystallize the moment Simon teams up with veteran actor, part-time terrorist, and Shang-Chi scene stealer Trevor Slattery (a riotous Ben Kingsley). It’s an odd-couple pairing that really shouldn’t work, but eventually eclipses every Marvel bromance that precedes it. For what it’s worth, it helps that it’s kind of built on a lie: Though Simon and Trevor immediately bond over their shared obsession with capital-A Acting, the only reason their paths cross is thanks to some meddling from the Department of Damage Control. They’ve been monitoring Simon for some time, and while the smarmy Agent Cleary (Arian Moayed) knows he presents some threat to public safety, he doesn’t yet have the evidence to prove it.
Fortunately for Cleary, Trevor never finished his prison sentence for posing as The Mandarin way back in Iron Man 3. With his career finally starting to return to normalcy (aside from the daily “Hey, weren’t you a terrorist that one time?”), Trevor would do anything to stave off another stint in super-jail. So he agrees to shepherd Simon through the audition of a lifetime — the lead role in a reboot of an old superhero movie, Wonder Man — under the guise of spying on the struggling actor.
Naturally, this unlikely duo ends up bonding along the way. Across Wonder Man’s eight bite-sized episodes (you can binge the whole thing in a day, and will definitely want to), Simon and Trevor survive one sitcom trope after the next. Most involve treks to disparate corners of L.A., run-ins with actors playing themselves (like The Matrix’s Joe Pantoliano, an old friend from Trevor’s pre-Mandarin days), and, of course, their fateful audition for Wonder Man, the movie. Cretton once again makes perfect use of Kingsley as Trevor: the series is laugh-out-loud funny, thanks in great part to his brilliant line delivery. He zigs where Abdul-Mateen zags, crafting a perfect balance of gravitas and bounding humor. Their misadventures, and the hijinks that ensue, are very inside baseball, and are sure to tickle many a reformed, aspiring, or working actor. The rest will reel in anyone with even a passing understanding of the superhero industrial complex.
Wonder Man is meta comedy without any of the self-satisfied snark. It’s refreshingly earnest about the role these films play within the industry (maybe because Marvel couldn’t bring itself to skewer its own bread and butter too thoroughly, but still). When venerated director Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric) speaks about his vision for the new Wonder Man, he’s reaching back to the way superhero movies used to feel: full of hope, color, and feeling. And that feeling stays with you as Wonder Man, the show, leans harder into its duties to the MCU in its back half. That’s because Cretton and his collaborators infuse Simon’s origins with heart-wrenching personal stakes. It takes great pains to detail the character’s fears, to explore the relationships that shaped him, and to lay out the reasons he values a career in art over one being worshipped as a hero.
The series doesn’t flinch away from prickly character work, either — it depicts Simon just as he is: scared, selfish, and lost, searching desperately for a way to reconcile the two callings warring inside of him. Its most interesting threads are internal, and often have nothing to do with his powers. Some (like his growing codependence on Trevor) actually lose steam when the focus turns back to the wider MCU, but it’s a minor qualm for a show this fully realized. Simon’s evolution is subtle — he fails more than he flourishes — but with Trevor’s help, he does eventually grow into a better friend, a more generous actor, and true superhero material.
The only real problem with Wonder Man is that it’s over almost too quickly: it leaves you wanting much more of Cretton’s take on the MCU. Fortunately, there is more to come from the director with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, due later in 2026 — but Wonder Man proves that the franchise is in better hands than it quite possibly ever has.
