She-Hulk: Lawyer goes green in more ways than one.
Along with its titular superheroes, the Disney+ show also embraces durability courtesy of executive producer Cat Coirowho directed six of the series’ nine episodes.
Coiro teamed up with environmental nonprofit Habits of Waste to take clues from their “Lights, Camera, Plastic” campaign, which aims to avoid single-use plastics on screen and replace them with reusable and eco-friendly items. Coiro used the same techniques on her film before Marry meand will officially put the initiative into action through a partnership with Paramount on the upcoming The Spiderwick Chroniclesshe directs the first two episodes.
In front of She-Hulk“I just tried whenever I could to remove single-use plastic from the screen — that meant if characters had lunch outside the office, instead of having containers on the go, I’d make sure they had reusable containers; it meant instead of using plastic water bottles, using Hydro Flasks throughout the show,” Coiro . tells us The Hollywood Reporter. She notes that in the first episode of the series, She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany) and her cousin Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) eating from a plastic bag of Cheetos: “Obviously that’s such a big part of the story, so that’s not something we’d change, but pretty much everything else is plastic-free on the show.”
Coiro had a key partner in her environmental efforts in Ruffalo, who is a key climate activist; she first realized his passion when the two were on set working on a scene showing the Hulk’s pantry, which, in reference to the Cheetos scene, was filled with junk food: “He threw there one look at it and he said, ‘Oh, no, no, kids will see this, we need to put healthy things in Hulk’s pantry.’ So we swapped all the chips and blue food coloring No. 17 items with tuna and beans.”
Thanks to Kat Coiro
“He understands the power of the media and he understands what it means to put these images on the screen, especially on a global level, and how it affects people,” Coiro said of Ruffalo. “And that’s really the underlying philosophy behind ‘Lights, Camera, Plastic’: what we show on the screen affects people, subconsciously it influences people’s choices. And so if we can, in a subtle way that doesn’t affect the story, just start saying, ‘Plastic isn’t cool,’ just like smoking wasn’t supposed to be cool.”
Hollywood’s approach to smoking is a common comparison to what Habits of Waste hopes to achieve in reducing the image of plastic, when the harmful effects of cigarettes became more normalized, smoking in the media declined dramatically. The organization notes that 1 million plastic bottles are thrown away per minute, 500 million plastic straws per day and 40 billion pieces of plastic cutlery per year.
“I call ‘Lights, Camera, Plastic’ the gateway to bigger environmental ideas because it’s a very small thing. It’s a baby step,” says Coiro. “If people start thinking, ‘Huh, what are the things I put on screen that aren’t sustainable?’ then you begin to think of much greater things.” She adds that she often sees people overwhelmed by the issue of climate change and so they end up doing nothing; this initiative “is this very tangible, very simple, very doable thing. Are we solving all the major problems of production, sustainability and waste? No absolutely not. But we start the conversation in a very easy to understand way.”
For producers, directors, and showrunners looking to follow in her footsteps, Coiro recommends starting small with something like working with the props department to swap plastic water bottles in a scene, and talking to your studio about what sustainability programs they have available.
“The more we can all connect and the more we can all work together, the more difference we can all make,” she says, adding how important it is to create a mythical world like She-Hulk to share these sustainable messages. “We ultimately want to build a real world with no excess waste, so why not start with the small world we build on the screen?”