‘Fargo’ producer Noah Hawley has opened up with a few details about his plans for the ‘X-Men’ pilot ‘Legion’.
After over a years worth of back and forth talks between Marvel and 21st Century Fox (the conglomerate that owns both Fox and FX), a deal was finally announced on October 14 for two new series based on the mutant characters. FX ordered the pilot Legion, based on the schizophrenic son of X-Men leader Professor X, while Fox unveiled the development of Hellfire, a drama based on the villains of The Hellfire Club (whose nefarious members were featured in the 2011 movie X-Men: First Class).
20th Century Fox already held the TV rights for X-Men, but moving forward on a TV series might have fostered further bad blood between them and Marvel Studios. So talks had to be held in order for Fox to be able to move forward on a series unhindered by any legal issues.
In a recent interview for TV Insider Hawley talked about the series and explained why he chose the character of Legion to develop a series around.
“What I really like about him is, here’s a character who is schizophrenic on some level, a character struggling with mental illness. Is he crazy or does he have these powers? The answer is, kind of both. I’m a big believer that the structure of a story should reflect the content of the story. And so I liked the idea that if you have a character that doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not real, that is also the audience’s journey.”
The producer also revealed that the series will be a stand alone project, which will likely exist as a separate entity to the X-Men cinematic universe.
“It’s conceived more as a standalone. I don’t want to say too much more about it on that level, but certainly it’s not constructed as a back-door anything. It’s more just that there’s a story that I want to explore that has to fit into that larger universe, which is exciting.”
You can read the full version of this interview here at TV Insider.
