Echo Interview: Richie Palmer On Wilson Fisk's Reach Beyond New York & Marvel Spotlight Stories

Echo follows Maya Lopez as she is on the run from Wilson Fisk’s organization after shooting him in the finale of Hawkeye. Returning to her hometown in Oklahoma to escape his reach, she’ll be forced to confront her past, including her relationship with Fisk. Maya will also reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace the community and family she left behind.

Echo stars Alaqua Cox, Chaske Spencer, Tantoo Cardinal, Devery Jacobs, Zahn McClarnon, Cody Lightning, and Graham Greene. Vincent D’Onofrio and Charlie Cox return to the MCU, reprising their roles as Wilson Fisk and Matt Murdock, aka Daredevil, respectively. The series was created by Marion Dayre and based on the Echo comics by David Mack and Joe Quesada.

Screen Rant interviewed executive producer Richie Palmer about the new Marvel series Echo. He discussed collaborating with the Choctaw Nation and teased Wilson Fisk’s reach beyond New York. Palmer also explained why Marvel wants to explore the Marvel Spotlight banner and which character he would like to see become a part of it.

Richie Palmer Talks Echo

Screen Rant: I love Echo, and it reminds me of Sons of Anarchy and Ozark. How did you work with the Choctaw Nation to tell Maya’s story authentically and respectfully?

Richie Palmer: I’m glad you liked the show, by the way. We had a great partnership with the Choctaw Nation. Chief Batton became a personal friend over the course of this show, and it was so amazing to be able to work with him and his team. Dr. Ian Thompson, who’s a historian of Choctaw culture, was somebody that was literally on call to us at all times.

We would be in VFX reviews and would get him on the phone and be like, “Hey, our mounds at Busto, we’re putting in the vegetation. What would it be based on?” He just always had the answers, and he always helped us make sure that it was as authentic as possible. Not just Dr. Ian, but a number of our friends on the Choctaw side were with us while we shot a lot of the sequences. It was great, and hopefully a mutually beneficial partnership.

Can you talk about building the visual language for Echo and working with Doug Ridloff?

Richie Palmer: Yeah. Doug Ridloff is one of our producers. He is deaf, and he’s a genius in his own right. Any conversation you have with him, he’s trying to teach you sign language while you’re talking to him, and that was amazing.

But the visual language was so cool. He was with us at all times, making sure that each character had their own unique way of signing, which was so true to life and one of the aspects of the show that I think could have been taken for granted. He made sure that every character used sign language in their own way and had different levels of proficiency, so that was cool.

And then he worked with Sydney and our DPs to make sure that we were actually framing to see the sign language. Sydney could speak to this a little better, but the closest closeup on our show is one that you can still see hands in the frame. And we weren’t going to let, for example, non-signing characters, like Vincent, have a closeup that we wouldn’t allow one of our signing actors to have. So, it was really cool that the visual language of the show was established based on the practical photography of shooting signing people.

I want to talk about the Marvel Spotlight for a second, because is this a long-term brand for the MCU shows. Can there be movies under this banner as well?

Richie Palmer: Oh, interesting. Well, I am a Marvel television executive and can speak to the television side that. We’re definitely hoping to see more obscure characters from the larger Marvel Comics cannon brought to life and probably under the Spotlight banner. It’s our way of taking a character like Maya Lopez, who was introduced as a side character in Daredevil comics, and saying, “Hey, this character deserves their own show. Not because she crosses over with Daredevil, but because look how rich her story is and look how rich the story of these new characters we’re introducing, her cousins, her family, her uncle who’s a criminal himself.”

I think that’s what Spotlight means to us is, look at all these new characters that we know and love from the comics. Let’s bring them to screen and just have some fun with them.

Are there any plans to do a follow-up season to Echo? Or is it more waiting to see how it performs on Disney+?

Richie Palmer: It’s waiting into seeing. I think the hope is always when we introduce any of these characters, that we get to see them again, whether it’s in their own show or in somebody else’s show, but the goal is always to see them again in the future.

Wilson Fisk is back, and Vincent D’Onofrio plays him brilliantly. He kind of feels like the street-level version of Thanos, where everything is converging on that. Is that the kind of goal or arc we’re going with Wilson Fisk for the foreseeable future?

Richie Palmer: I’m only going to speak on Echo, but I think you should stay tuned and see where that character goes in the future, because what you’re saying sounds awesome.

I love that this story takes place in a small town because it feels so much more intimate. Can you talk about the show taking place in Tamaha, Oklahoma, and how this city itself almost feels like its own character?

Richie Palmer: Yeah, that’s so awesome that you saw that. We shot on location in Atlanta, but before we shot our show, we went down to Oklahoma with Sydney and all of our department heads, our production designer, our locations manager, and we saw what the real town in Oklahoma looked like and felt like and the people that lived there. And we really wanted to emulate that, and I think we did a pretty good job.

And again, VFX we used to fill out some of the backgrounds, like the stickball sequence, putting in the mounds, but all of that was shot on location with some set work from our production designer, Chris Trujillo, and they did such amazing work. I don’t know, I can’t say enough good things about the team that brought that to life.

We see Maya go from viewing family as selfish to selfless throughout the series. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Richie Palmer: Yeah, that is the big theme of the show. She was raised by Kingpin in New York as a criminal and was taught to be selfish. She was taught if you want something, go take it, don’t let anybody stand in your way no matter what the cost. And she grew up learning all of those lessons and never thinking that there would be anything else for her.

And only at the onset of our series, when she is thrust back into her hometown of Oklahoma and is forced to see some people from her past she never wanted to see again, or even a spiritual connection she feels to this town the second she enters town, I think she wasn’t expecting to feel that way ever again in her life. And that’s the fun of our show, is seeing her have to navigate those feelings of, “Oh, I thought I had it all figured out, and now family is the reason that I don’t?” I don’t think that’s something Maya ever expected.

This is the first time we see Kingpin’s power reach outside of New York. How far does his reach extend outside of New York?

Richie Palmer: That is a great question and something we definitely wanted to make feel like, “Oh, he’s not just a New York guy.” It’s definitely larger than it seems and larger than he would let the public to know, especially, I want to say, going forward for his character.

Do you have a personal favorite character that you’d like to see spotlighted in the Marvel Spotlight?

Richie Palmer: Oh, interesting. Truly just what I would like to see, personally, one day? It’s interesting, because I’m like, “What am I allowed to say?”

This is just what I would like to see one day. I am a big fan of the character Nova from the comics. Who knows if that would be a Spotlight character or if that would be a bigger thing? But there’s a lot of characters from the comics we haven’t introduced yet that could get their own Spotlight series.

About Echo

The origin story of Echo revisits Maya Lopez, whose ruthless behavior in New York City catches up with her in her hometown. She must face her past, reconnect with her Native American roots and embrace the meaning of family and community if she ever hopes to move forward.

Check out our other Echo interviews here: