Netflix has a hit with The Umbrella Academy, a quirky superhero drama adapted from the comics by Gerard Way. It stars an ensemble of maladjusted characters who grew up in the same house under an adopted father who mercilessly tried to mold them into a superhero team.
Problem is it didn’t quite take, and the characters are now carrying around a lot of adult baggage. But the upcoming third season will show us the Umbrella Academy as it could have been.
You see, at the end of season 2, after averting an apocalypse in 1960s Dallas, the Umbrella family returns to their own time to find that an entirely different group of adopted siblings are now inhabiting their former home. That includes their brother Ben (Justin H. Min), who died in their own timeline. But this new Ben is a far cry from the kind man they all knew.
Becoming a new version of Ben on The Umbrella Academy was “exhausting”
“The way I thought about about season 3 is, the Umbrellas are a family that didn’t know how to be superheroes. The Sparrows are superheroes who never knew how to be a family,” showrunner Steve Blackman told Entertainment Weekly. “That is the fundamental difference in how they go about being superheroes.”
Accordingly, the new Ben may be better at using his powers, but he’s not remotely as friendly. This sucks, since he was the only member of the family pretty much every member liked when he was alive. “Steve and I really talked at length about this balancing act between nature versus nurture, and what that would do to someone like Ben,” Min said. “I think Ben, in his essence, is a very impressionable person, so I think nurture is a huge striving force behind whoever Ben is and whoever Ben becomes. So in this alternate reality where they’re being trained as these assassins and mighty superheroes who are famous and well-known, these are all things that we talked about leaving a great impression on Ben.”
"I wanted the opportunity to bring a whole new life to this character and throw our family off. They remember Ben as being a kind and thoughtful person, but that is not who this Ben is. I wanted to see how they reacted to this totally different characterization of Ben."
That meant inhabiting him physically; this Ben spends a lot more time on his appearance than the other one. “To be honest, it was exhausting,” Min said. “I got to work with a voice coach while I was filming to slightly lower my register, as well as learn how to project more. And they wanted me to physically embody the character, so I had to go to the gym for the first time in many years. Having those external factors in place in terms of body and voice really helped me to inhabit the character in a real and convincing way.”
And then there are those powers. Ben has one of the most interesting skillsets in a family of heroes will widely variant talents: he can summon eldritch tentacles from a portal in his body and unleash them on his enemies. “I think the previous version of Ben was fearful of his powers,” Min said. “It was something he never fully learned how to control on his own, so when these tentacles were unleashed, he didn’t know what would transpire. But since the Sparrows have been trained since such a young age to utilize their powers during combat, it’s something the new Ben feels much more control over. It’s a casual way for him to assert his superiority. In the very first montage where we introduce the Sparrows, you even see him using his tentacles to smoke a cigar and drink. It’s something he whips out as a party trick and will do very casually. He has control over it and he’s very proud of it.”
The Umbrella Academy season 3 premieres on Netflix on June 22.
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