Making ‘Wonder Man’ Gave Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest the Kind of Buzz Any Indie Filmmaker Chases

On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

Rest assured, Josh Gad is still alive.

Specifically, the club-hopping Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Josh Gad who disappeared inside Doorman during the fourth episode of Disney+’s “Wonder Man.” Gad is still in there, somewhere. (We’ll come back to this later.)

While editing the sixth episode of “Wonder Man,” series co-creator Destin Daniel Cretton saw something he’s never quite seen before. In the episode, stars Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who are also playing actors in the show, are summoned to director Von Kovak’s mansion for a second round of auditions for the new “Wonder Man” movie. During an intense scene, Simon punches a hole through a fellow actor’s face. 

“Just the boom through and the back of his head explodes with gushy confetti or whatever,” remembered Cretton in an interview with IndieWire. “And I fell on the ground and I was dying. We took that clip and sent it to set so they could see it, and everybody was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the show we’re making.’ It was so cool.”

Andrew Guest, the other half of the series’ co-creating team, explained how exactly this was done: “We did a cast of that guy’s head. We had a Simon arm on a track and we had two guys ram that arm through a fake head and then had all that material come out of the back.”

When watching that scene back frame by frame, which I did after learning how this was achieved and having assuming beforehand that this was the work of CGI, yes, it looks gross and cool and obviously a dummy head. “If you look at it, if you actually frame through that, you’ll see that it looks fake,” said Cretton. “The temptation was to use VFX to make it look real. Because the head looks a little too stiff and it feels like a mannequin. And VFX did a pass of it and we’re like, ‘It’s not funny anymore.’ So we took all the VFX out and you can see the mannequin in there. It makes me so happy how well that worked.”

A lot about “Wonder Man” makes Cretton and Guest — who are both the recipients of this season’s IndieWire Honors Auteur Award — happy. First, that this series, about an aspiring actor trying to hide the fact he has super powers, exists in the first place. It’s a bold decision from Marvel.

Cretton explained, “I think what a lot of people don’t see from the outside is that Marvel, like most studios, but Marvel in particular, is made up of a lot of people who not only love comics, but love movies. A lot of the executives went to film school and are major cinema buffs.”

‘Wonder Man’Suzanne Tenner

Cretton and Guest even framed their two lead characters around Jon Voight’s Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo from the classic “Midnight Cowboy.” They went so far to have Simon and Trevor meet at a repertory showing of John Schlesinger’s 1969 Best Picture winner. 

That’s something else that Cretton and Guest are happy about: getting scenes from an X-rated movie into a Marvel production.

“You know the hardest part about that?,” asked Guest. “The cigarette-smoking. We used real clips from ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and initially there was cigarette smoke at the bar and we had to comb through that movie. Everyone is smoking all the time and we couldn’t show any character smoking. That’s not easy to do.”

Guest added, “One of the things that excited me about writing about Hollywood was having this outsider perspective, these characters who are sort of artists but also down on their luck and struggling. And this contrast of types, too. You look at the poster for ‘Midnight Cowboy’ and you’ve got Joe Buck and Ratso, and that got exciting to me just visually.”

What makes “Wonder Man” unique is Simon, our protagonist, is not Wonder Man. Simon is a life-long fan of the fictional character of Wonder Man and wants to play Wonder Man in a new movie, based on a low budget “Wonder Man” movie from the 1980s. Simon does have superpowers, but he doesn’t want anyone to know this, because there is a law preventing anyone with superpowers from being in a movie. (Blame Josh Gad again for that one, who, again, is still alive.)

But this opens up a lot of meta questions like, what is the purpose of superhero movies in a universe that has real superheroes?

“We really talked about this a lot,” said Cretton. “It’s why I’m laughing — how many discussions we had about how does the real world look at superhero movies in a world where superheroes exist. I mean, this movie in particular, it’s obviously a bit of a 1980s throwback movie, I’m guessing the superheroes of today aren’t saying, ‘This is a perfect depiction of our lives.’”

But what about the new “Wonder Man” movie? The one Simon stars in? Guest chimed in, “It’s something definitely to explore in Season 2, I feel it.”

‘Wonder Man’Suzanne Tenner

There will be a second season of “Wonder Man,” even though the first season feels so self-contained that it, unlike other Marvel properties, doesn’t read as something even intended for sequels. The first season even with a scene of Simon and Trevor flying off together, somewhat echoing the ending of “Midnight Cowboy,” set to Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin.’”

When making “Wonder Man,” was another season something they even thought about? “I mean, that was always the hope,” said Guest.

Cretton added, “And I feel like with them flying off with that song, it does feel like a complete movie. We were always hoping for more, but I think I love that it is its own complete package, but still leaves you with an open-ended question in the end.”

So what does a Season 2 of “Wonder Man” look like? Well, for starters, Simon has just starred in a superhero movie and is now at least somewhat famous, so that changes some things.

“That’s one of the things we want to explore in Season 2,” said Guest. “He has starred in a huge movie, but I think we’re not going to take for granted what that means necessarily. We’re going to drill down on what it feels like to have had one big movie and what comes next and what level of fame is he at? I think we want to explore and mine for whatever material we can.”

Guest continued, “I think the philosophy at Marvel is, much like Trevor Slattery continuing to appear, it’s about what happens when they put stuff out there. And the fact that we did have the response we did is a testament to Marvel’s risk-taking on this. I feel like they wanted to reward the fans who found this show, which is just thrilling for us because it’s a gift to be able to keep making it.”

Oh, yes, that’s another thing that makes Cretton happy: the response to the show, one of the seemingly rare properties these days where both critics and fans can agree, “This is good.” 

Cretton explained, “I actually am very happy that people connect with ‘Wonder Man’ because it was weirdly, it felt so, I don’t know, it felt so … personal? It gave me the same feeling I had when I was in film school and we’re just huddled and making this little weird thing that we’re all cracking up over. And who knew that people would respond to it the way that they did? It makes me feel very, very happy.”

Cretton hasn’t had too long to enjoy his “Wonder Man” happiness though, because, come July, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” will be released, a film that is on the complete opposite of the spectrum when it comes to Marvel’s financial investment. Cretton said, “At one point, I was telling Kevin Feige, ‘Isn’t it funny that I’m working on the smallest thing you guys have ever done and the biggest thing you guys are doing at the same time?’ (We do not know if Kevin Feige finds this funny or not, but we will take Cretton’s word for it that he does.)

‘Wonder Man’MARVEL TELEVISION

OK, back to Josh Gad.

The fourth episode of “Wonder Man” is all about the character Doorman (Byron Bowers); it is remarkable that one-eighth of this series is completely devoted to such an obscure character with an unusual power. Doorman can create doors through his body. This talent is noticed by Josh Gad (yes, played by Josh Gad) who puts Doorman into his bank-robbing heist movie franchise.

The problem is, during the filming of a scene in which Josh Gad enters Doorman to escape an armored truck, Gad enters Doorman, Doorman vomits, and that’s the last we see of Josh Gad. And, from that point on, super-powered people are not allowed to be in movies. It’s called The Doorman Clause.

So when the series ends, where is Josh Gad? Did he die?

“No,” said Guest.

Then where is he?

“He’s in Doorman,” said Cretton.

Wait, then why did Doorman vomit?

“Your interpretation is that he was vomiting out Josh Gad?,” asked Cretton with a laugh.

Not necessarily, but the vomiting did signal that something went very awry. Guest explained, “No, that just closed the portal, so Josh Gad couldn’t make it through. We delved into the anatomy of Doorman quite a bit and the physics of how that would work. It’s all been worked out.”

Cretton added, “We actually had a post-credit thing that we didn’t put in where Josh Gad is in the void just saying, ‘Hello, hello? Is anybody out there?’”

“We knew we needed a cautionary tale for Simon,” continued Cretton, “we wanted concrete stakes so that people could connect to this idea of what’s on the line for him creatively. Because he doesn’t just want to get work in Hollywood, he wants to have a long-standing, meaningful career, and that can be a hard thing to relate to, I think, for everybody out in the world. So that’s where the Doorman Clause came from. We wanted something that was concrete that you could understand. If anyone ever found out about Simon, that would be the end, goes to jail.”

Sure, the success and accolades surrounding “Wonder Man” have led to many good things for Cretton and Guest: a second season, the Auteur Award, and more. That’s great news for them, but we’ve got to admit: it sounds like also pretty good news for Josh Gad.

All episodes of “Wonder Man” are now streaming on Disney+.