‘Marvel’s Hit-Monkey’ features one of TV’s strangest and most compelling duos

Welcome to Thanks, I Love It, our series highlighting something onscreen we’re obsessed with this week. 

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The premise for Marvel’s Hit-Monkey is gloriously insane: A Japanese snow monkey (voiced by Fred Tatasciore) teams up with the ghost of an assassin named Bryce (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) to take down the people who massacred his entire tribe.

You wouldn’t expect this bonkers revenge story to make you cry, but Hit-Monkey pulls it off by investing heavily in Monkey and Bryce’s strange, yet oddly beautiful, relationship.

An obscure character from the corners of the Marvel universe, Hit-Monkey made his first appearance in a 2010 comic by Daniel Way and Dalibor Talajić. Hit-Monkey’s showrunners and executive producers Will Speck and Josh Gordon quickly became obsessed with his origin story, admiring how it balanced the tragedy of Monkey’s loss with a unique buddy comedy dynamic.

This dynamic between the comic’s main characters was something that Speck and Gordon expanded upon in developing the show. “We wanted to paint with a lot of different brushes and not just focus on the assassin plot,” said Speck in a phone interview with Mashable. 

In the comics, the Bryce character is unnamed and his background is a mystery. All we know is that he was double-crossed on a job, and that he wants to guide Monkey on his journey to get revenge. However, in the show, we learn a lot more about Bryce. He’s a loner whose life was upended because of violence, sending him down a dark and destructive path. He’s a jerk, but he’s a jerk you find yourself rooting for in spite of his many, many flaws.

“We wanted to paint with a lot of different brushes and not just focus on the assassin plot.”

He also has more of a tragic streak than his comic counterpart. “He’s a ghost, and he’s having to look back at the mess of his life,” said Gordon. “To us that was poignant and funny.”

Bryce’s flaws make him a perfect foil for Monkey, who begins the season as a total innocent but later ends up wearing the identity of assassin just as well as he wears his tiny little suit. The Bryce we see before his death is the kind of character Monkey risks becoming, a worrisome fate for anyone.

Of course, there’s a lot of humor to be mined from the interactions between Monkey and Bryce. “There’s a natural comedy that comes from having to tolerate somebody, especially somebody who can’t communicate, has a very violent streak, and happens to be a monkey,” said Speck. “It felt like an area to explore that was jumping off from what they did so nicely in the graphic novel.”

The communication barrier is one of the key elements of Hit-Monkey: Monkey speaks entirely in monkey sounds that are only subtitled when he speaks to other animals. Bryce is still able to respond and speak to him in English, so we as the audience infer Monkey’s meaning from Bryce’s responses and Tatasciore’s excellent voice acting. 

Speck and Gordon compared this dynamic to the interactions between Han Solo and Chewbacca in Star Wars. “You have Bryce come in with his own skewed interpretation of what Monkey said and get this great comedic banter between them, even though only one of the characters speaks,” said Gordon. “Once we unlocked that, it really gave the show its legs.”

Despite their disparate life experiences (and being entirely different species), Monkey and Bryce still need one another. They’re tethered together by cosmic forces — something Bryce calls a “ghost leash” — and have a lot to learn from each other.

Some of that learning is unpleasant, like both Monkey and Bryce coming to see how horrible Bryce is as a mentor. “Bryce slowly realizes he is a complete scumbag…and has no business sort of mentoring anybody, much less this really pure, innocent, good character,” said Gordon. “He also realizes that Monkey is much better at being an assassin than he would ever have been.”

Monkey surpassing Bryce’s skill as an assassin reminded Speck and Gordon of another cinematic duo: Mozart and Salieri from Amadeus. It’s a classic case of the student becoming the master, and making the master feel insignificant by comparison. In Bryce’s case, it’s especially painful because he’s dead. There’s no way he can affect the world anymore or make up for his past, except by acting through Monkey.

“There’s something really sticky about that realization of ‘I’ve met somebody who’s so much better than me in every way.’ It holds a mirror up to you, and makes you feel worse about yourself,” said Gordon.

Against all odds, this show about a killer monkey and the ghost he’s stuck with becomes a tale of found family and reckoning with trauma.

Ironically, one of the most pivotal moments in Monkey and Bryce’s partnership comes when the pair are separated in the show’s eighth episode, “Home Sweet Home.” Monkey returns to the mountains, while Bryce confronts his past through a series of flashbacks, revealing how the two are going down parallel paths. It’s by far the show’s least humorous episode, as Hit-Monkey pivots from an action comedy to a rumination on the cyclical nature of violence.

“One of the important things we wanted to examine was how violence is like a virus, and how it passes from one person to another,” explained Gordon. “So the violence of Bryce’s life…has, by this episode, slightly infected Monkey. Monkey, even if he wanted to, can’t go back to the innocent creature he was.”

When Monkey and Bryce realize the extent to which they’re tied together by tragedy, they come to understand how they can help each other. Against all odds, this show about a killer monkey and the ghost he’s stuck with becomes a tale of found family and reckoning with trauma. You’ll come to Hit-Monkey for the strange concept and awesome fight sequences, but you’ll stay for TV’s next great pairing.

Marvel’s Hit-Monkey is now streaming on Hulu.