Joss Whedon

Born on June 23, 1964, New Yorker Joseph Hill Whedon comes from a family linked to the world of television sitcoms, as both his father and grandfather worked as screenwriters, with great success. His mother, a history teacher, published several novels. He very early chose his nickname, Joss, taking it from a Chinese word that can mean ‘fate’ or ‘luck’. As a child he was a great fan of superhero comics, in whose world he took refuge to cope with the sad divorce of his parents.

He received an education in a rigid British school, before returning to his country, where in 1987 he graduated in Cinematography from Wesleyan University. Following in the footsteps of his family, Joss Whedon made his debut writing episodes of a sitcom, specifically the successful Roseanne , and also took care of an episode of Sweet Home… Sometimes! . He was disappointed when, after a long development process, he managed to sell his most precious project, the script for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) , made into a film by Fran Rubel Kuzui, with the now forgotten Kristy Swanson .as protagonist. But the director did not know how to capture the tone close to comedy, and he made substantial modifications that resulted in a bland and boring film.

His work as a writer on Toy Story , later modified by other screenwriters, was not widely respected . But the end result earned him an Oscar nomination. For his part, Jean-Pierre Jeunet did not take his work to the letter to the letter for Alien Resurrection , to such an extent that he completely changed the ending. Before becoming a writing star, Joss Whedon worked hard, collaborating with the team that wrote Titan AE , an animated film directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman . And he worked as a script doctor (specialist in fixing script problems), especially he did an excellent job with Speed .

His career began to take off when The WB Network offered to resurrect Buffy in the form of a television series. They gave him complete creative control, and although at first the protagonist, this time reincarnated in the body of Sarah Michelle Gellar, faced a supernatural threat with her friends in each episode, Whedon was one of the pioneers in making progress. to the characters, offer radical twists in the various seasons, and finally let the action continue from episode to episode ‘in crescendo’. It started in 1997, two years before The Sopranos , so despite its light tone it can be described as a work of enormous influence in the golden age of soap operas.

Whedon’s desire for experimentation knows no bounds, to the point that he suddenly introduces a new character into an episode, a sister of Buffy, as if she had always been there, or shoots a musical episode (one of the most appreciated by fans). In another of her most memorable installments, the protagonist wakes up in a psychiatric hospital, where she is locked up imagining the life she leads in the series, so nothing the viewer knows has really happened. “A series has to be much more than 40 minutes to keep the audience entertained. If not, it not only bores me, but also embarrasses me,” said Whedon.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gained enormous public support, to the point that it had a spin-off, Angel , centered on the figure of the vampire who had an affair with the protagonist. In addition, Whedon gained a small number of fans who have supported all his projects since then.

In contrast, Firefly , about the crew of a spaceship, was such a failure that it was canceled hastily after the broadcast of 11 of the 14 episodes produced. Once again, Whedon was lucky to get a second chance, and he converted the plot into the B-series film Serenity , with Nathan Fillion , one of his favorite actors, leading the cast already seen in the series, who was joined the then unknown Chiwetel Ejiofor .

It also crashed with Dollhouse , with Eliza Dushku – who had already been another vampire slayer in Buffy -. This time, the actress played a young member of a dark organization, which reprograms her to send her on various missions, completely changing her personality. It lasted two seasons of 13 episodes each, which passed uneventfully.

Whedon has also made history for writing comics at a time when television writers preferred not to, so as not to be pigeonholed in a theoretically inferior category. In addition to “Fray”, an 8-issue miniseries, he led to the cartoons what would have been the eighth season of Buffy, which was canceled after the seventh. He was also recruited by Marvel, where they had realized that Buffy the Vampire Slayer clearly paid tribute to its characters, especially in relation to the fate of the witch Willow, inspired by the Dark Phoenix saga, one of the most appreciated stories of “Patrol X”. Once in the ranks of the factory, he dealt with the best stage of the mutant group of the new millennium, after taking charge of a new collection, “Astonishing X-Men”

The results were so satisfactory that the publisher puts him in charge of the star project of the film adaptations of his comics, Marvel The Avengers , a meeting of several of the most representative characters of the house (Thor, Captain America, Hulk, Iron Man , The Black Widow), where several subplots seen in other superhero adaptations come together. Expectations were very high, but Whedon did not disappoint. He got the comic to be recognized on the screen, giving importance in the development of the film to the multiple characters, and also a fluid rhythm and tremendous spectacularity. He has led to a spin-off series, SHIELD Agents , which brings back one of the characters, Agent Coulson ( Clark Gregg), despite the fact that he presumably died in the film. The screenwriter directed the pilot and appears as creator with Maurissa Tancharoen , a contributor to Dollhouse , and her brother Jed Whedon , also a regular scriptwriter for that series.

Marvel has been quick to keep him in their ranks to deal with the sequel, The Avengers: Age of Ultron . To distract himself from so much superhero – and from the pressures of a high-budget production – he has returned to the musical, taking care of an episode of Glee , and has shot the modest film Much Ado About Nothing, according to Joss Whedon , adaptation of Shakespeare’s work with some of his regular performers, for example Nathan Fillion and Clark Gregg appear in the cast . Whedon is happily married to Kai Cole, with whom he has two children.