Ms. Marvel episode four is now streaming, and ahead of tomorrow's fifth installment, we caught up with Aramis Knight (Into the Badlands; The Dark Knight Rises) to talk about finally being introduced as the Red Dagger and what's to come next for the Pakistani superhero now that his mentor Waleed (Farhan Akhtar) is gone.
He also touches on how his experience on Into the Badlands helped prepare him for this stunt-heavy role, working with Bollywood icon Farhan Akhtar, developing chemistry with leading lady Iman Vellani, his intensive dagger training, and a whole lot more.
Check out the full video interview below!
ROHAN: With this being your first major project since Into the Badlands, did your fight training on that series help you get into character as the Red Dagger on this one?
ARAMIS: Oh yeah, 100%. Daniel Wu, I mean, he's like a father figure to me as well as a mentor, not only in acting but also in my martial arts. But yeah, that show brought me close to a skill, Badlands I'm talking about, brought me close to a skill that I never thought I would learn, which is martial arts, Wushu, and it's definitely translated to my career. That's like my favorite part of being an actor is being able to learn new things like Ms. Marvel, I was able to bring my martial arts from Badlands onto Ms. Marvel. And now, Ms. Marvel, I've learned this new dialect, as well as being a part of the MCU, and I'm going to bring that to my next project, but I definitely think my training on Badlands catered towards me ending up being Red Dagger. I mean, it's just perfect.
ROHAN: You've worked with Daniel Wu, who is awesome, and now, you got to work with Farhan Akhtar, who's a legend in his own right. What was that experience like for you?
ARAMIS: It was great, Farhan is such a lovely man. He's so warm. We didn't spend much time talking about the industry at all, we spent more time talking about our interests and hobbies. He’s such a down to earth guy, just a consummate professional and he was amazing to work with it. It was very easy to develop chemistry with him and I think also the dynamic between Waleed, who is very much a superior to Red Dagger when it comes to the pecking order of the Red Daggers, but then also having this girl, who I'm a bit charmed by, and she's a bit charmed by me, and the banter between us. Watching him kind of field the two, I think, created a very interesting dynamic.
ROHAN: You're also working closely with Iman Vellani, so can you tell me more about developing chemistry with her?
ARAMIS: It was super easy, because we became really good friends, and we lived right next to each other in Thailand. So, we were hanging out like every single day. Going on set, it was really just kind of bridging the gap between Kareem and Kamala and Aramis and Iman, like it wasn't super difficult at all. Over time, it became super easy for us to just kind of tap into the characters, and I think our off-set friendship, relationship really, really catered towards our on-screen chemistry.
ROHAN: You're presumably the last major character we're going to meet this season, and the third male lead to star opposite Iman, but unlike everyone else, your character is based in Karachi. Did you do anything special to capture that authenticity of Kareem and the setting?
ARAMIS: I was able to, I had a culture coach and a dialect coach. So, I was able to really dive into what it's like being raised in Karachi, learning the culture, learning the dialect. So, that part served very well to create kind of a stark difference between her life in Jersey and her life in Karachi, but I think even more than that, just the fact that Kareem has grown up as a superhero, he's grown up in this organization, he knows so much about it, that I think he's a real source of information for her and that's where a lot of the trust is built. I think he holds a lot of answers for Kamala, that she's trying to answer through the first three episodes, and episode four is kind of a culmination of all of that, her meeting me and really learning about who she is.
ROHAN: With his mentor Waleed (Farhan Akhtar) gone, having sacrificed himself to protect him and Kamala (Iman Vellani), what should we expect from the Red Dagger's journey the rest of the season?
ARAMIS: Yeah, well, I think that it's time for Kareem to step up, for sure, as kind of the successor to the Red Dagger throne, in a sense. He's definitely gonna have to take on more responsibility without Waleed, as well as losing his mentor, someone who he had a very personal relationship with. So, I think it creates a lot of trials for Kareem, but it's also the way Waleed would have wanted to go. It was a very honorable death that that he took, and I think Kareem knows that and everyday they dedicate their life to the cause. So, life or death, I think it's worth it for them.
ROHAN: How much training did you undergo to get proficient at throwing daggers?
ARAMIS: Well, yeah, so the dagger throwing was something new that I had never done before. I'd never thrown - I mean, I threw a couple of ninja stars on Badlands, but I never really trained it. So figuring out different stances, different ways I'm gonna pull daggers, as well as working with the special effects team to figure out, how many daggers is he actually carrying? Where does he pull them out? We kind of settled on the idea of it being like I forget, Jeremy Renner? Who does he play? The guy with the bow-and-arrow… Hawkeye! Yeah, similar to that, in that he kind of has an unlimited amount of knives. Some of them are gag knives, you can kind of pull them from wherever.
So, there was definitely some training aspect to that being able to justify where the knife is coming from and how I want to throw it, the different motions, but overall, I think that Red Dagger was really shaped around my abilities. You know, like, I'm a person who's really good with hand to hand combat. I'm super agile, I would say, as a martial artist, and I really enjoyed ground work. So, that was all very much implemented into Red Dagger and you see that especially in the Dhobi Ghat fight, you can tell he likes to be low on the ground, or he likes to be hand to hand and we created his fighting style based on my abilities.
ROHAN: Yeah, you can always tell when someone is acting versus when someone knows what they're doing and you definitely were the latter because you looked like you knew exactly how to handle those weapons.
ARAMIS: For sure, For sure, and, also, I have an amazing stunt double Brian, he's also my trainer. He's just light years ahead of me in terms of martial arts ability, but I was really lucky that they let me do all of the hand to hand combat, all that stuff was me, and I was really happy because only I can bring the presence of Kareem to the fight, even if, you know, he would do it better. I really wanted to do it myself, so that not only am I creating this character, but I'm also creating a physicality and something that's really new and specific to me.
Plus, check out our interviews with Farhan Akhtar ("Waleed") and episode four/five director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy below:
Marvel Studios’ “Ms. Marvel” is a new, original series that introduces Kamala Khan, a Muslim American teenager growing up in Jersey City. An avid gamer and a voracious fan-fiction scribe, Kamala is a Super Hero megafan with an oversized imagination—particularly when it comes to Captain Marvel. Yet Kamala feels like she doesn’t fit in at school and sometimes even at home—that is, until she gets superpowers like the heroes she’s always looked up to. Life gets better with superpowers, right?