James D’Arcy, who plays Edwin Jarvis on ABC’s Marvel’s Agent Carter, told Matt Atchity of Rotten Tomatoes that, “It is the single most fun job I have ever done.” And it doesn’t hurt that he’s having all this fun with Hayley Atwell. D’Arcy and Atwell have been real-life friends for a long time, so their onscreen chemistry is equal parts camaraderie and witty banter from the writers.
It’s no surprise then that D’Arcy’s favorite thing about Jarvis is how he treats Peggy Carter. “I love his wry outlook on the world. He is essentially a good person and unashamedly trying to do his best in the world. I genuinely love that, in 1946, at a time when the word ‘sexism’ had not even really been invented — never mind come into common parlance — that he is almost really the only person in the show who treats our leading lady with dignity and respect.”
Rotten Tomatoes also asked D’Arcy whether or not he was into comic books as a kid. The answer? He was more interested in getting a pair of X-ray glasses from the back!
“I am not, I would say, a big comic book person. I remember reading them as a kid. I remember being really interested predominantly in the things that you could buy at the back. I don’t know if you remember that you used to be able to buy X-ray specs and stuff like that… I believed that they really were X-ray, by the way.”
Of course, D’Arcy is fully up to speed on all things Marvel now. He explained to RT how his version reconciles with later versions of Jarvis in the Marvel Universe movies. To D’Arcy, the biggest difference between his Jarvis and Paul Bettany’s The Vision is that Bettany is essentially playing Tony Stark’s memories of the best version of who Jarivs would be, whereas D’Arcy’s Jarvis exists before Tony was even born.
So, what’s to come in the rest of season one? “Brilliantly, there is resolution across the board for all the characters — and not just in terms of our plots, but in terms of the character work that we have as well, and the social commentary that’s taking place is the baseline below all of this — all of this is resolved within the eight episodes in a really satisfying way.”
The next episode of Marvel’s Agent Carter, “A Sin to Err,” airs Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 9 pm on ABC. Season one is Certified Fresh at 97 percent.
Hear the full interview with James D’Arcy from Marvel’s Agent Carter, starting at 24:00.
