With Legion, Hawley has taken this idea-what if you were several “yous” somehow simultaneously-and translated it to the small screen in a way that is not only immersive and exciting but, at times, overwhelmingly confusing. The son of chrome-domed psychic Charles Xavier (a spoiler for the comics but not, as far as I know, the show), Haller is the human equivalent of an overbooked hotel his mutant ability is essentially a heightened form of dissociative identity disorder, formerly known by its cruder term “split personality,” with each unique persona adding to a deafening cacophony of separate abilities. The character of David Haller has been around in paper-and-ink form since 1985 when writer Chris Claremont and artist Bill Sienkiewicz brought him to life in New Mutants #25. Any viewer expecting the formulaic blueprint of your typical Marvel blockbuster-the family tragedy, the unwilling hero, the British thespian hamming it up as the villain, etcetera, etcetera-is likely to come away disappointed or, at least, plenty confused. “Crazy,” as it turns out, is an apropos way to begin any conversation over Legion. “Great, let’s just go crazy,” she replies, stone-faced.
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Despite having no idea what a C-Shot is, I agree. The first order of business she suggests after sitting down is that we take a C-Shot together. Despite what every interview with the actress written between 20 would have you believe, she’s not actually April Ludgate. But it’s not a cold-shoulder thing, either, not a heightened social awkwardness. You often don’t realize she’s joking until halfway through a sentence, and by then it turns into a game of catch-up with an Upright Citizens Brigade veteran. And Noah saw that’s who I am, really, underneath it all.” I think that maybe that’s my real, underneath persona, and at heart, I’m like a 50-year-old drug addict living in a mental hospital.
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“Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,” she says and laughs, before changing tact.
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The question becomes, What made the writer-director, after a single meeting with Plaza, decide the 32-year-old actress would be a perfect fit for the part? In the original pilot script for Legion, Hawley wrote the character of Lenny Busker as a male, middle-aged former drug-addict, the resident, older sage of Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital, providing both optimism and advice to our mutant main character David Haller (Dan Stevens). Chris Large/FXīut is it clear to Hawley? Harder to say.