Loeb: When we first sat down to talk about who Jessica’s world was going to be populated with, Melissa talked about the kind of character that she wanted her to be friends with and that it was important that there was somebody in her life who made it all look easy but not necessarily felt that way. One of the things that we’ve talked about from the very beginning is that, as many people know, the show at one point was referred to as AKA Jessica Jones and we used to refer to the AKA of it. Every single person has an AKA in their life, which is this is the person they’re presented by and this is who they actually are. How true is that in life? Here we are, wonderful professionals who are talking elegantly all the time and you can imagine that’s how we are all the time. We never have a bad day and we never say anything wrong. That kind of looking at that situation. When we started talking about who in the Marvel universe fit that category, one of the things that we talked about was the character of Patsy Walker or as we refer to her as Trish. It was literally a five-minute conversation where we said we have this character and this is who she is and all of a sudden Melissa lit up and went “We can do that. That’ll work.”
What’s kind of lovely is if you go back and go all the way back to the 1950s, because that’s how long the character has been around, and you realize who Patsy Walker was and what it meant and how she then grew up and she went through the period of being a model and all that stuff, Melissa and the writers gave that history it’s own kind of unique spin. I think that when people see it, they’ll recognize that it very much not only works for today’s audience but in the same kind of way, gave Rachael Taylor a very real and grounded place. But what was most important was the relationship between her and Jessica and how these two women who in some ways are sisters, in terms of their friendship, could be that different and yet on the same token, believe in the same kinds of things and that question of what is it to be a hero and the responsibilities that you have when you have abilities is something that brings them together and also continually pushes them apart.
