If there's one thing you need to know about Inhumans King Black Bolt heading into the series premiere of Marvel's Inhumans, it's that his voice is his superpower in the worst way possible. One word from Black Bolt can level a city, destroy an army or, worse, kill someone close to him. That's why it is his superhero burden to never, ever speak.
Black Bolt's inability to speak due to his power creates great dramatic tension in comic books when the audience can live inside of the character's mind, but is a bit more challenging to convey on a TV show. As the leader of the Inhuman Royal Family that lives in the city of Attilan on the dark side of the moon, TV show Black Bolt needs to be able to communicate with more than just strong eye contact. Anson Mount took on the role of the leader of the Royal Family knowing he would never speak a word as his character, but the series did have a different approach to allowing him to communicate.
With the guidance of Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb, Mount and Serinda Swan, who plays Black Bolt's wife Medusa, developed an American Sign Language-inspired sign system that would give the king of the Inhumans a different type of voice. "[Jeph] knew me well enough to know what I would geek out on," admitted Mount. The logic of the Inhumans story prevented Black Bolt from being able to use ASL because he's never been to Earth, so Mount worked with a sign consultant to develop a lexicon that Black Bolt and Medusa would understand.
"I'm borrowing some of the underlying rules of ASL and what makes it work efficiently," he told IGN on the set of Marvel's Inhumans. "It creates homework and it creates choreography and it creates getting things into the muscle memory. I have to get it so into my muscle memory because I can't be thinking about it and acting at the same time. And to get yourself to go from here to here, it's not easy. But it's easier than learning Spanish; I'll give you that."
For Swan, Black Bolt's inability to speak verbally to his people created a new set of difficulties for her character as well in addition to having to create and learn this sign language with Mount. Within this version of the story, Medusa and Black Bolt bonded as children after they went through their terrigenesis transformations. Black Bolt's powers essentially ostracized him from the Inhuman community until he found a way to control himself from speaking, but Medusa snuck into his Quiet Room to befriend him and together they created this signing language to communicate. As they grew up and fell in love, Medusa became Black Bolt's public voice, which meant Swan had to learn how to carry herself like a king as well as a queen.
"We worked really hard, and got in there," Swan said of creating a bond with Mount for Medusa and Black Bolt. "We found little idiosyncracies, found the beats, found the moments. ... It's this really interesting duality between keeping Medusa's presence and not fading away, and also honoring the king and what he represents to the people of Attilan. So we definitely worked hard."
"It's rare that a lead can't speak and I think between the two of them there's a really beautiful connection and this journey that the two of them go on," she continued. "You realize if they get separated, Black Bolt can't communicate to anybody. At all. So there is this codependence there. It's codependence between two very independent people."
Showrunner Scott Buck and the writing staff would write stage directions for Black Bolt into the script so that the cast, directors and Mount would all have a general idea of what he was expected to do in each episode. But Mount apparently grew to have such a strong control of the character that these were no longer needed.
"Black Bolt is purposefully very enigmatic. He doesn’t always want people to know what he thinks. But we as writers always needed to know what he’s thinking and what he’s feeling in each scene and whether that’s something we wanted to be able to project into the scene and what not. It was important that even if he’s not talking, he’s our lead and the center of our show and if he’s in a scene, he needs to be driving a scene," Buck told IGN. "That could be a huge challenge. So at least in terms of the script, we would make it very clear what Black Bolt’s presence was in that scene.
"People were looking off him, to the point that I had such heavy stage directions in there, trying to make it clear to anyone who would read this so the director would know to make sure he’s the focus of the scene. But it was to the point that Anson came up to me and said, 'Can we back off on that a little bit?' Because what happened was I was over directing Black Bolt within those scenes so it was sort of a relief to hear that because it meant that Anson had such a strong grasp of the character that I didn’t need to give him every single detail of what Black Bolt was doing."
The Inhumans have been represented in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before on Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, but Marvel's Inhumans is the first time the franchise is showcasing the Royal Family leading the race of terrigen-transformed superhumans. Even though there are kings and queens and a city on the moon, Mount still takes the approach that Black Bolt's gifts are really a handicap, a weight his character must carry.
"His character is very unique in that his power limits him in ways," said Mount. "He is the leader who must be aware of the power and potential danger of his public voice. I think he's immediately charming in that way. Readers appreciate Black Bolt because they see him struggling with a deep sense of responsibility. ... Black Bolt is an amazing character but I have to admit, there's the tightrope walker side of me that wants to play the lead of the show that can't speak. When else am I going to get that opportunity? And being 44, when am I going to get another opportunity to play a superhero?"
For more on Marvel's Inhumans, read this breakdown of all the main characters on the TV show, plus find out how they brought fan-favorite Lockjaw to life. Marvel's Inhumans hits theaters in IMAX on September 1st, and begin airing on ABC on September 29th.
Terri Schwartz is Editorial Producer at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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