Joss Whedon: The Biography (73 page)

As the
S.H.I.E.L.D
. pilot went into development, the public got its first look at Joss’s passion project.
Much Ado About Nothing
premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2012. The response from festival-goers was intense and incredibly positive. When the cast came to the stage after the movie ended, Joss was overcome with emotion from all the support for his “little” personal movie.

“You make a strong man cry,” he told the crowd.

He and Kai had gone into their production of
Much Ado
eager to do something of their own, together and quickly. They hadn’t really planned what to do with it once it was done. When they finally discussed bringing the film to the festival circuit with those far more familiar with the traditional indie route, they were asked what their expectations for marketing and distribution were. “We didn’t think about that,” Kai says. “It was about the process of getting it done, making the movie with our own little studio. Let’s just make this stuff. Don’t worry about the end—what we’re going to do with it, who our audience is. Just make the thing, make it great, and it will find a home.”

Joss had taken the film to Toronto in the hopes of finding theatrical distribution, and he found it in a familiar place. Lionsgate, in partnership with Roadside Attractions, picked up
Much Ado
just as it had
The Cabin in the Woods
. The Shakespeare adaptation would have a far shorter wait to hit theaters, though, as it was set to premiere in select cities eight months later, in June 2013.

But the rest of 2012 was all about
The Avengers
. Marvel gave the blockbuster film a blockbuster marketing campaign, and with it, Joss Whedon was thrust into the spotlight of the mainstream press. In addition to all his superheroes landing on magazine covers across newsstands,
Wired
and
GQ
did big features on him, and
Entertainment Weekly
named him one of its Entertainers of the Year. This was going to be a difficult year to top.

As the new year began, Joss was well into preproduction on the
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D
. pilot. He cowrote the script with Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, creating all-new characters for the regular cast aside from Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson. Once shooting began, directing duties were all on Joss, but there were other familiar faces on set to help ease the hectic schedule. Guest stars included Cobie Smulders as Agent Maria Hill, Ron Glass (
Firefly
) as Dr. Streiten, and J. August Richards (
Angel
) as Mike Peterson, the first superhero with whom S.H.I.E.L.D. works on the series. The main cast included Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May, whom Gregg said “seems very Whedonverse to me, but I guess she hadn’t worked with him before.” The rest of the regulars, he said, “are young actors I didn’t know well, and then as soon as I got to act with them a little bit, I said, ‘Oh, Joss really knows what he’s doing. New members of the Whedonverse!’”

Production on the
S.H.I.E.L.D
. pilot wrapped on February 12, announced via Twitter by Tancharoen. As the series headed into editing, Joss needed to tend to
Much Ado About Nothing
. Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions did not have the same marketing budget as a studio like Marvel, so Joss headed up the promotions juggernaut on his own. This brought about Joss’s first foray into social media, as up until now he’d only posted on sites devoted to him or his series. He tweeted under the film’s account, @MuchAdoFilm; in May, he’d officially join under his own name.

On March 7, 2013, the cast headed to the film’s US premiere at the South by Southwest festival—many by bus. In a publicity stunt dubbed Bus Ado About Nothing, Joss and much of his young cast made the
twenty-four-hour trip from Los Angeles to Austin in a tour bus with only one toilet, documenting their journey via Twitter, Instagram, and Vine videos. The adventure had been conceived when some of the cast were discussing how they’d get to the festival for the March 9 premiere. “I knew people wanted to go and they couldn’t get rooms and they couldn’t get flights. Some of them couldn’t afford them,” Joss said. So he decided to hire the bus. When Lionsgate found out, the studio picked up the tab.

“I can’t believe Joss took two days out of his time to do that with us. It’s a little insane,”
Much Ado
cast member Tom Lenk said. “Does Michael Bay get on a party bus with his cast? Probably not—they’re robots. He drives inside of them!” The rest of the cast—including Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, and Clark Gregg—met them in Texas for a discussion panel and screening.

A week after the bus took off, another beloved set of collaborators announced an even bigger venture in the world of DIY-ish filmmaking. Taking a cue from Joss’s long history of fan outreach, Rob Thomas and Kristen Bell announced a Kickstarter campaign asking fans to help fund a
Veronica Mars
movie. The plan was to raise $2 million to prove to Warner Bros. that the series, which had gone off the air six years prior, was a viable prospect for a relaunch. If they could raise the money, Thomas, Bell, and much of the original cast would return for a feature film continuation of the cult hit, to be shot later that year. The news immediately went viral, and on March 13, excited fans met the goal in less than ten hours. (Ultimately, the campaign would raise $5.7 million from more than 97,000 devoted fans.) By the next day, news outlets were already reaching out to Joss to see if he’d consider using the crowdfunding method to relaunch
Firefly
yet again.

Joss knew the question was coming as soon as he heard about Thomas’s campaign, which tempered his own excitement as a
Veronica Mars
fan with a feeling of dread. He pronounced his love for
Firefly
at every turn, often saying how much he’d love to do another film with the cast. “I did have a moment of just,
Oh my god! I’m in trouble now
,” he said. He worried about matching the level of quality fans had come to expect from the series. “
What if it’s not that good?
I can do something that’s not that good—that’s fine. But if I do
that
and it’s not that good, I’m going to feel really stupid.” Ultimately, it was a hypothetical concern; he cited his busy Marvel schedule and his gestating plans for a
Dr. Horrible
sequel
as the reasons why he didn’t currently have time to pursue a fan-funded
Firefly
film.

On May 14, ABC announced that
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D
. would be joining its schedule for the 2013–14 season. With his commitment to the
Avengers
sequel, Joss said that the series would be in the hands of showrunners Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. Still, it would bring Whedon storytelling back to television three years after
Dollhouse
was canceled, and on a brand-new network.

Two weeks later, Joss was back at Wesleyan to receive an honorary degree and deliver the commencement address at the school’s 181st graduation ceremony. “He came for our breakfast for seniors and alumni—and he knew what that meant. He stood on his feet for four hours, and he never stiffed anyone,” Jeanine Basinger says. “Joss talked to every student, he talked to every parent—he was the last person out the door, because he didn’t leave before anybody who wanted to talk to him had left.”

These one-on-one interactions were much less stressful for Joss than the task that lay just ahead; he was quite nervous about giving his commencement speech, which he opened by telling the graduates that they were all going to die. After that uplifting message, he went on to explain that we all live with the duality of wanting to experience and create everything while at the same time we’re bound to the limitations of our physical selves and our limited life spans. And that we’re all torn, as well, between the two metaphorical roads that Robert Frost wrote about. In making a choice to take one road, one job, one relationship, other options will be closed—yet instead of the dread young Joss felt when listening to Sondheim’s “The Road You Didn’t Take,” this older, possibly wiser one asserted that it’s not the roads we take that will bring us to happiness but the determination to keep searching, questioning, and learning.

“If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better,” he said. “To accept duality is to earn identity. And identity is something that you are constantly earning. It is not just who you are. It is a process that you must be active in. It’s not just parroting your
parents or the thoughts of your learned teachers. It is now more than ever about understanding yourself so you can become yourself.”

After the weekend at his alma mater, Joss dove back into selling people on the project that he said made him the happiest—the one that he got to do how he wanted, with whom he wanted.
Much Ado About Nothing
is the film that he’d earned through over twenty years in Hollywood—learning how to direct, saving the money, and most important, collecting the people he wanted close and forming a little family with them. The film opened in the United States on June 7 and in the United Kingdom on June 14. Joss, Alexis Denisof, and Amy Acker spent several weeks in a hard publicity push. Even Kai was pulled into the media blitz to discuss her role as producer and the extensive renovations she’d made to the house that served as the film’s setting.

Joss, in particular, did interviews across all media—online, in print, and on television, including two PBS appearances that would have pleased his public television–loving mother. In the United Kingdom, the highly respected national newspaper the
Guardian
did a major feature on Joss, and
Much Ado
was covered in depth on arts shows like Radio 4’s
Front Row
. The publicity schedule was exhausting for Joss, who was in the spotlight just as much as the film itself was.
The Avengers
had been covered from multiple angles—the A-list stars, the new superhero story, and the blockbuster hype. For
Much Ado
, a well-known tale played by lesser-known actors, the press primarily covered Joss and his approach to Shakespeare’s beloved play.

And for the most part, critics and audiences praised
Much Ado About Nothing
for making the centuries-old comedic play (with some questionable commentary on women’s sexual expression) seem accessible and contemporary. Mark Kermode of BBC Radio 5 Live said that it made “all the dialogue and the language completely comprehensible,” which helped audiences connect with the story. “Any twelve-year-old could follow everything that was going on,” he added. The
Guardian
called it “the first great contemporary Shakespeare since Baz Luhrmann’s
Romeo and Juliet
”

The Whedon repertory players also drew fine notices. Amy Acker’s portrayal of Beatrice was often called out as a highlight, as were Nathan Fillion and Tom Lenk’s dry,
Law & Order
—esque take on
hapless constables Dogberry and Verges, more traditionally portrayed as broadly buffoonish. Joss’s fans delighted in the Whedonverse Easter eggs throughout: Maurissa Tancharoen sings at the party (showing off her skills as former member of the 1990s teen pop group Pretty in Pink), and Drew Goddard and Kai are prominent wedding guests. (Kai also shows up in the party scene, lying across the piano as Maurissa sings.)

Boston’s
Patriot Ledger
drew witty connections between Joss’s latest films: “OK, Marvel fan boys. I reluctantly sat through ‘The Avengers,’ now it’s your turn to reciprocate by seeing a more erudite offering from your sainted Joss Whedon—by way of Shakespeare. It’s called ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ and like ‘The Avengers,’ it has an effete villain in Don John, a ball-breaking Black Widow babe in Beatrice and a smooth-talking charmer in the smug, Iron Man-ish Benedick. They, along with various cohorts, are involved in all natures of treachery and mayhem, as various factions do battle over a key ingredient in maintaining homeland security: Love. And, boy, does it get ruthless.”