Variety spoke to Ritter about her approach to the super-powered detective, her place in Netflix’s corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (alongside Mike Colter’s Luke Cage and Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil) and why Jessica Jones is “the best part that I had ever seen.”
It’s kind of exactly what you just said. She’s such an original, sort of obscure, misfit character in the Marvel universe and I love how grounded the show is and how deeply complex and developed she is. I feel like it’s such a rare opportunity to get a role like this. It’s a part that you find in some weird, dark, obscure independent movie that nobody will ever see, and fact that I get that opportunity on a Netflix platform, with the Marvel logo… it’s completely insane. When I first read the script — I read the first few before I got the part — I walked out of there and felt like they were the best scripts I had read and the best part that I had ever seen, available to me or not. A tough female character like this doesn’t come around every day.
A little bit of both. This was some heavy lifting for me. I’m in 99 percent of the scenes so there wasn’t a lot of down-time, so I kind of just had to stay in that mindset, and go home, and go to sleep, and come back. If I had an opportunity to shake it off, whether it was with Carrie-Anne [Moss] or Rachael [Taylor] on set, and enjoy myself, that was welcome. But it’s the kind of work as an actress that I’d always wished to do. So for me, it was very creatively rewarding to just roll up my sleeves and sink in.
Big time. When I first heard about the show, my manager called and said “Netflix” — I’d really wished to be on a Netflix show because I love the content that they’re putting out and I think their shows are really top quality, and those are the shows that I watch. I love “House of Cards,” I love “Bloodline,” I love “Orange is the New Black,” so I had written on my refrigerator that I was looking for “groundbreaking television on Netflix.” That’s what I wanted to do, so when my manager called like, “Okay, so Netflix wants to see you for this superhero show,” and I like to audition so I was like, “Great! I’m never going to get that, but I’m happy just to go.” My mind never went to the place where “Jessica Jones” lives. I just assumed “superhero — that’s not what I look like, I’ll never get that.” They were parsing out information, [all] secretive, as Marvel is, and I started reading scenes and I was like, “This is really cool. Is this real? Is this really this dark and this dramatic and this character-driven?
And then I met with Melissa Rosenberg and Jeph Loeb, and at the end of the meeting we’re just going through all the things that she is and everything they’re saying, I’m just lighting up more and more, and then at the end of the meeting, they just said, “And she needs to be funny.” I was like, “What? Now you’re talking.” I was like, “Come on. Who else are you going find that could do this?” Then I started screen testing with Mike [Colter] and I was very vocal about how badly I wanted the part. I just loved how it was an opportunity for me to do drama, and comedy, and action sequences, but the real thing that really got me was when they said they needed someone that could be funny. I’m like, “Come on.” So I just worked my ass off. I wanted to prove to them and bring a work ethic to it that I didn’t think anybody else in the whole world would ever bring. So everyday was like, “Okay,” proving that they choose the right girl.
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