Spoiler warning: The following article contains full spoilers for Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which is now streaming on Netflix.
It’s no secret that Scott Pilgrim Takes Off goes off in a very different direction.
After killing off Scott in Episode 1, the entire series revolves around finding out what happened and who’s behind it all… and in Episode 7 we find out.
It was Scott all along.
It just wasn’t the Scott we know and love, however. After being seemingly killed during his fight with Matthew Patel, Scott was actually dragged through a Vegan portal by a future version of himself. That older, a little bit sadder Scott is voiced by new cast member Will Forte. And it’s just about perfect.
“We couldn't have done it without Will Forte because we felt like we did not want the guy to be a drag,” said co-showrunner BenDavid Grabinski in an interview with IGN (which you can read more of here). “We didn't want it to be a bummer.”
Forte’s casting is one of the ingenious ways they addressed a very difficult problem – why would you want to see an older version of a beloved character?
“I was just always like, why would anyone want to see Scott Pilgrim in his late thirties?” said Scott Pilgrim creator, Bryan Lee O’Malley. “That's the most depressing thing. I kept thinking he would still be living with Wallace, maybe his friend group is further deteriorated.”
Thankfully, they found a way forward with Forte, and he really brings his A-game.
“There's something so inherently interesting, and funny, and likable about Will, even when he's playing characters that are nuts,” said Grabinski. “There are characters of Will's that I love that if another actor played, I'd be like, ‘I can't watch 30 seconds of him.’ The most abrasive people ever. So, I love old Scott no matter who plays him, but I knew the audience would love him in the way we wanted to if it was this guy. Because as f**king nuts and insane as he gets, he's still to me like a little puppy, and that's acting, man.”
As we soon find out, the entire plot has been orchestrated by older Scott as part of a convoluted and pretty villainous plan.
And that’s entirely the point – Scott becomes the villain of his own story.
It’s a neat turnaround for a beloved pop culture hero… and a hilarious nudge to the fans who always considered Scott to be the real villain.
“People online are like, ‘Scott's the worst character. Scott's the villain of his own story,' ” said O’Malley. “They really love to harp on that now, which no one mentioned in the 2000s. But yeah, so we thought let's give them Scott as the villain of his own story, let's do it proper.”
“I think that every single person who has ever written a comment online saying that Scott's actually the villain of the story ever thought that the villain of our story would be Will Forte as this old Scott,” said Grabinski. “I'm not saying that we're geniuses or anything, I just don't think they have the same dumb brains we do.”
“Well, also, I don't think they'd think we're listening, either,” added O’Malley. “So, there's that too.”
“Yeah, it's impossible to not take in the noise,” said Grabinski. “You have to follow your own instincts, and this whole story is Bryan and I doing the best version of the story that we can and just following our own guts. But sometimes there's a happy bonus, which is you can follow the story that you want to tell that is also, to us, a very funny way to address that take on the character.”
This new take on Scott as his own worst enemy really works, but director Abel Góngora wasn’t always convinced.
“The second [Will] started doing the lines, everybody understood it,” said Grabinski. “I'll never forget Abel being in the Zoom while we were working with Will and within just a couple line readings he said, ‘Okay, now I finally understand what you guys are doing with this character.’ And when we were writing it, I was hearing Will's voice in my head. To this day, every once in a while, almost as a dumb exercise, I think of another actor there, or actors people mentioned that we'd said no about, actors we love, and I just think they would've been so abrasive. So yeah, we didn't want to have it be a bummer. And there's some great stories that do that. I'm obsessed with Batman Beyond, but we didn't want the sad blah, blah, blah guy.”
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off premiered on Netflix on Nov. 17.
Want to read more about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off? Check out the adorably catchy opening credits sequence and read more from our chat with Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
