From writer Bruno Heller and director Danny Cannon, and based on DC characters created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger, the 10-episode Epix drama series Pennyworth follows Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth (Jack Bannon), as a former British SAS soldier in his 20s who forms a security company and goes to work with Thomas Wayne (Ben Aldridge) in 1960s London. Not yet Bruce’s father, Thomas is a young billionaire from the East Coast of the United States, who finds himself in need of Alfred’s services, especially with a mysterious organization, known as the Raven Society, out there and causing all sorts of trouble.

During this interview with Collider, executive producers Bruno Heller and Danny Cannon talked about why Alfred Pennyworth was a character they wanted to delve into more deeply, what made this the right way to tell this story, exploring the chance meeting between Alfred Pennyworth and Thomas Wayne, not wanting to include the typical Batman villains, how the realism of the story affects the fight scenes and action, having the freedom of storytelling that a network like Epix provides, the role of women in this world, and what they’re most excited about audiences getting to see.

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Image via Epix

Collider:  At what point, along the way, did Alfred Pennyworth become a character that you wanted to explore more, and in this manner?

BRUNO HELLER:  That’s a good question. It was a combination of charms and blessings that we had this wonderful character. We both wanted to work in England, and the DC universe has got lots of wonderful superhuman, superheroic characters. There are very few real people that have iconic status, and Alfred Pennyworth is one of them. The really attractive thing about it is that he’s an underutilized and under spoken of character. He’s someone who’s been in the frame, but never really looked at. Because of his age, we could leap back into the past and tell a completely fresh origin story for a character that everyone knows. So, it ticked all of the boxes, in that way.

DANNY CANNON:  His age was key because I don’t think there’s been a DC show that’s gone back into the past and been at a different period. The world that could be created, because it had to be a DC version of them, plus the fact that you have a young man, leaving the war and re-entering society, everything just turned us on quickly.

It’s also not something that typically happens, to bring us a show like Gotham, where Alfred Pennyworth was a character, to then do a different show on a different network, still following that character, but at a different time in their life.

CANNON:  At first, it didn’t go. There was a very similar version – I don’t think the script changed much, at all – but then it was dead for awhile, and we were asked to pursue Metropolis, which we did. I have to tread carefully here, but as long as we could be true to what we wanted to do and we were pleasing ourselves, we wanted to do it. It’s very hard to weather this industry, if you don’t believe in what you’re doing. You have to believe in it. And this was the one that we were adamant that, “It’s this, or we don’t need to do it”

HELLER:  We weren’t looking at other minor characters in the Batman canon to exploit. It was very much that this was a real person with real problems and real history that we could explore. From a larger point of view, today’s TV world is amazing, with the amount of opportunities and material that’s coming out, but it’s very important to have – for want of a better word and it’s horrible word – branded material, and something that stands out because people already have some sense of who the characters is, what the story is, or where you’re coming from. You can make a wonderful show, these days, that nobody sees. If you want people to see your TV shows, rather than just make good TV shows, you have to think about that side of it.

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Image via Epix

In order to tell the story of Alfred Pennyworth, it means you have to also tell the story of Thomas Wayne, who we’ve only ever really known in death. What’s it like to explore a character like that, who we’ve never really gotten to see the life of?

CANNON:  His only function has ever been to die, and to create this drive for Bruce. Going back to the world and figuring out how and why they would meet, Bruno came up with this great idea for them colliding together, by happenstance. That’s when I was like, “That totally makes sense.” The idea is that, here’s a guy trying to avoid violence, but going into security, and then here’s a man needing it. The whole meeting is a mistake.

HELLER:  It’s not just the story of Alfred and Thomas, but also Martha. Martha is one half of the DNA that makes up Batman. Thomas and Martha are the two sides of Batman, and Alfred is the surrogate parent that creates the complete character. So, to be able to examine that Batman myth from this completely fresh angle, which is not a spandex, super brilliant, supernatural angle, but is instead about real people, about parents and fathers and sons and legacies, and about life turning out not the way you thought it was gonna be. That’s all good dramatic narrative. Beyond the gung-ho macho stuff of the Batman world, it’s good drama.

Not wanting to have the Batman villains in this means that you can explore villains that we haven’t gotten to see, that come from a more human aspect of the story.

CANNON:  When we were first talking about this, Bruno said the villains were people like Jack the Ripper, which totally makes sense. The light bulb, for me, straight away was that it’s England in the ‘60s, or this new Dickensian/Orwellian England in the ‘60s, so drawing from characters in classic literature in Britain is like our superheroes. That made sense to me. Whether they’re the descendants of people or are related to people, or just look or feel like them, five seasons flashed in my head.

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Image via Epix

Is that the vision? Do you have five seasons of ideas to tell?

CANNON:  Easy.

HELLER:  One of the things you have to start with, or at least I and Danny do, is that, if you don’t have some idea of what Episode 9 of Season 4 is gonna be, then it’s probably not a good TV idea. In success, that’s what you’re gonna be faced with, so it just makes sense to be sure that you have a story that has enough juice in it, that it will carry on, and can keep changing and growing. With these characters, it’s both a challenge and a blessing that everyone knows how the story ends, but they don’t know anything about what happens between when we start and the beginning of Gotham, with the death of Thomas and Martha. It’s a blank slate, which means you can tell very real, character-driven stories, rather than having to be constantly topping yourself. The danger of the straight-up superheroic aspect of the DC comic world is that it’s really hard to top what can be done in movies, and you have to keep topping yourself. With this being much more about the actual real lives and real people, there’s a coherence to it.

 

Does that change the fight scenes and the action, since it’s coming from a different place?

CANNON:  Yes. The thing about fight scenes is that, when you’re in a theatrical world like Gotham, and somebody is called Penguin and you know someone’s gonna be Batman, you embrace that theatrical world. The difference with this world is that it feels very much more real, so the violence that you do comes out of an emotional place. It’s about how violence affects people, rather than the mechanics of violence and the choreography of violence, which they never used to do in the ‘60s movies. When you watch those films now, there’s no chasing across rooftops or car chases ‘cause it was too difficult shoot. You couldn’t move those cameras around. Some of those cameras were heavier than a car. So, I embraced that idea, and we weren’t throwing the camera around and making everybody acrobats. It was much more like, if you’re in the military and you have to put out a problem right now, what do you do?

HELLER:  In the modern world of superheroes, you’re literally destroying the world, so individual lives and individual deaths don’t really have any impact because there isn’t screen time for killing people, moment by moment. This is a chance to actually pay service to the meaning of life and death, and the horror of it. Pennyworth, unlike a lot of heroic characters of his type, is someone with a real humane sense of honor and gentleness, who doesn’t want to do violence or be involved in that sort of thing, at all.

CANNON:  You could literally do this show without violence. The Alfred Pennyworth character is an honestly charming man who represents optimism. He represents everything that a young man needs to move forward, in this tough, difficult world. That’s what’s appealing about him. Young men don’t have those role models anymore.

HELLER:  He’s one of those idealized father figures. Everyone would like to have an Alfred type of mentor in their lives, to teach them kick-boxing and driving and how to pick up girls, and all of that stuff.

CANNON:  Superheroes who come from other planets and have supernatural powers, it’s hard to relate to them. You just have to keep topping it. The pressure to create set pieces instead of scenes must be very difficult. But this is very basic. This is a young man, and he’s gonna go through life’s journey. We know where it will end. We just don’t know what’s gonna happen, along the way, or why it will end the way it does.

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Image via Epix

What’s it like to have freedom in the storytelling, on a network like Epix, where you don’t have restrictions on the content?

CANNON:  They’ve been amazing. It’s incredible. At one point, we were asked to do a shorter version of the script because the script was quite complex and long, and Epix were like, “Absolutely not. Go with the long version.” So, straight away, they were like, “Please, realize this vision, in its most fullest version.”

HELLER:  From a writing point of view, in terms of the moral complexity of the characters, we’ve been able to do things in this DC world, that will be revealed in this first season, that will be very shocking and challenging and will make people think twice and three times about the history of these characters and how they thought of them. It allows you to explore them as three-dimensional people that are very flawed and who make terrible and tragic mistakes, or even do dishonorable things. That is almost impossible to do in straight up network TV. It’s much more about good versus evil. And if you’re gonna draw a distinction for what’s the difference between those two platforms, it’s pretty much that. You’re allowed to be morally complex.

The female characters on this show are not just victims. They’re also perpetrators, and they have a strength that allows them to fight for themselves. What can you say about the role of women in this world?

CANNON:  That was the same in Gotham. When you have a great villain, or you have a great hero, their gender doesn’t really matter. You can mix it up. In this world, it’s much more about characters and story than it is about anybody fitting into something. It must be tough for anybody, these days, to keep making the same drama, over and over, because it fits a brand. I think our job is to reinvent brands, every time you do a show. Otherwise, you’re just watching five versions of the same show, or 50.

HELLER:  One of the good things about the modern era of storytelling, and what you would call the empowerment of women, from my point of view, it means that you can portray evil and morally questionable women, and you don’t get pushed back on that. It used to be that you might try to create a morally complex female character, but the demand to make them likable or lovable or sexy, was very powerful, and it was scary for the actors to take that leap. Now, in this format, where we can do whatever we want, to a degree, and DC is happy to be taking characters like Martha Wayne into a completely different world, it just allows you to portray women on screen, as they’ve always been. They’ve always been powerful. Don’t get me started on that. Media has taken hundreds of years to catch up with the actual reality. If you ask any man, who’s the most powerful person in their life, it’s gonna be a woman, whether it’s their boss, or their mom, or their wife, or their sisters, or their daughters. It’s not really creating strong female characters. It’s reflecting the reality that’s always been there.

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Image via Epix

It’s also nice to see female characters who can be the villain without it being a result of having been the victim first.

CANNON:  These are all decisions made by non-creative people, who take creative work and systematically break it into math.

HELLER:  Epix understands that sort of thing is key to creating modern stories. You can’t always be asking what excuses somebody’s behavior, or how to salvage somebody’s goodness. Sometimes you can’t. Some people are more fucked up than that.

CANNON:  And those are the roles that women were begging to play – the flawed anti-heroes, and all of those roles that were always given to the character actor men. The most interesting people are the most messed up people.

HELLER:  It’s not just the defeat of sexism. Now, that there are exponentially more shows, by force, there’s a wider range of characters and stories that you get to tell because you can’t tell the same damn stories, over and over again. That’s what TV does, and not in a bad way. For want of a better word, it’s comfort food. It doesn’t mean that it’s fast food and junk food, but it’s comfort food. Now, it’s more like a food court. That’s a bad analogy. You can get a whole variety of different cuisines.

Since we’re only starting to get a sense for what this show will be, what are you most excited for people to see, with what you’re able to do with this?

CANNON:  My hope for it is that they’ll get as involved and as immersed in it, as I am. Every time we make a decision, whether it’s a set building, or location, or casting a new character, the world that we go into just gets more and more complex and lush. We keep opening other doors and going down other staircases, and opening more doors, and every room is more interesting than the last, when it comes to stories and characters and painting the world. It’s one of those worlds that, once you immerse yourself within it, it’s our job to just keep the surprises coming and to keep peeling the layers.

HELLER:  We’re gonna shock people with some of the things that our heroes and heroines do, precisely because people are used to the grand narrative of these superheroes. These real people are gonna make mistakes that will challenge and amaze and even dismay people.

CANNON:  And upset some.

Pennyworth airs on Sunday nights on Epix.

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