IRON FIST Casts Alice Eve as Typhoid Mary

Iron Fist is about to catch a case of Typhoid fever.

During yesterday's Iron Fist panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2018, Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb announced that Alice Eve will play the supervillain Typhoid Mary in the Netflix show's upcoming second season.

When asked about appearing in Season 2, Eve responded, "What I loved about it was that it was very, very violent.  But the reason that I took the role was because I got to play someone with multiple personalities."

Eve, 36, is best known as Carol Marcus in the movie Star Trek Into Darkness, and has appeared in the movies Men in Black 3, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Sex and the City 2, She's Out of My League, The Raven, Criminal, and The Decoy Bride.  Her other television appearances include episodes of Black Mirror, Entourage, Robot Chicken, and Agatha Christie's Poirot.

Created in 1988 by Ann Nocenti and John Romita, Jr., Typhoid Mary first appeared in Daredevil (vol.1) #254 as Mary Walker, a woman whose condition was accidentally caused when Matt Murdock had tracked a villain down to the brothel where Mary worked.  Matt attacked the man, but surprisingly, the girls working there came after him.  Panicking, Matt lashed out, knocking Mary out of a nearby window.  It was at this moment she somehow became "Typhoid Mary" and vowed no man would ever hurt her again.  In later appearances, however, she would imply that she was a victim of child abuse.

Suffering from dissociative identity disorder, Mary Walker has three other abnormal personalities in addition to her seemingly healthy one.  Her "Mary" personality is a timid, quiet pacifist, while her "Typhoid" personality is adventurous, lustful, and violent.  Her "Bloody Mary" persona is brutal, sadistic and a misandrist.  Mary once claimed that there was a fourth personality who is "lost" but has not since been mentioned.  Aside from highly developed martial arts skills, she also possesses telekinetic powers and pyrokinesis.

In her first appearance, she met Murdock, and was hired as an assassin by the Kingpin.  She then battled Daredevil, while beginning a romance with Murdock.  She temporarily reverted to her "Mary" personality, but then reverted to her "Typhoid" personality, and began a romance with the Kingpin.  She hired Bullet, Bushwacker, Ammo, and the Wild Boys to attack Daredevil, and then personally led these criminals against the blind vigilante.

At some point after the superhuman Civil War's events, she was found by Henry Peter Gyrich and recruited into the Initiative program as "Mutant Zero", although her identity as Typhoid Mary was kept secret from her teammates.  Gyrich revealed that Mutant Zero was a mutant that not only remained empowered following M-Day, but one that was not included in the official record of the remaining mutants.  Technically not existing in any official capacity, her true identity was made classified.  According to Dr. Leonard Samson, Mutant Zero was still mentally unstable and referencing any of her other identities could lead to a period of instability.  Mutant Zero was brought into the Shadow Initiative (the Initiative's black ops team), but she could only be activated once per mission due to her mental instability.

During the event known as Shadowland, Typhoid Mary answered Daredevil's call for superpowered people to join The Hand in providing martial law for an ever-increasing area of New York City.  She claimed that her time in the Initiative was successful in integrating her fractured mind, but Daredevil did not believe her.  Following the war, the Kingpin used secret code words to activate her fourth personality, revealing that she was an inside agent who was ignorant of her "true" goal all along.

Eve will be the second actress to portray Typhoid Mary in live-action, after Natassia Malthe in the 2005 film Elektra.  The character has also appeared in the animated series Avengers: Secret Wars, voiced by Tara Strong.

Iron Fist returns to Netflix for Season 2 on September 7, 2018.