‘Echo’ and ‘What If’ Star Devery Jacobs Addresses Viral Clip That Asked if Both Maya and Kahhori Need to Exist: “That’s Egregious”

Marvel fans are gearing up for the release of the latest entry in the comic book franchise with Echo, which features a Native American lead for the first time in a live-action MCU project. But just weeks before the show debuted, Marvel also introduced another Native character to its lineup, that of Kahhori in the animated series What If …?

Praise from fans and critics alike was extremely strong for Kahhori, who is an original character for What If …?, with many calling the character’s episode one of the best of the series. But there were also some viral comments that questioned if Echo was really needed after Kahhori’s breakout moment, as having two Native American characters would be “repetitive,” despite the fact that the two don’t have similar backgrounds and are among the very few diverse characters in the MCU.

Devery Jacobs, the Native American star of Reservation Dogs who appears in Echo as a character named Bonnie and voices Kahhori in What If …?, reacted to that thinking at the Los Angeles premiere of Echo on Monday while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter.

“Would somebody go up to a white guy and say, ‘This is the one perspective for a white story that is out there’? Would somebody go and say that?” Jacobs asked. “That’s egregious, that’s insane that anybody would say that.”

#Echo and #WhatIf star @kdeveryjacobs reacts to online comments that questioned if the MCU needs two Native American heroes in Alaqua Cox's Maya Lopez and her own #Kahhori pic.twitter.com/CTDmSp3fYd

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 9, 2024

“I don’t even know if it’s justifiable for an answer, but I’ll give one anyway,” Jacobs continued. “I think that the story of Kahhori in What If …? is astronomically different from that of Maya Lopez in Echo,” she said, contradicting the online comments that the characters were similar.

“I think one is talking about colonization and history and features Mohawk cultures and communities — the community that I come from — and the other is about an antihero, kind of a villain, who is coming back to her Choctaw Nation and to her family, and it’s really a dark crime noir family drama,” she added. “And so, they’re both individual stories that absolutely deserve to be told.”

Echo, which also stars Alaqua Cox, Chaske Spencer, Tantoo Cardinal, Zahn McClarnon, Cody Lightning, Graham Greene and Vincent D’Onofrio, starts streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on Tuesday.