“Ironheart” cast talks taking the MCU to Chicago: 'A bit of a battle ensues' (exclusive)

"It's an invitation to explore her roots and her upbringing," star Dominique Thorne tells EW. "We're taking it back to her hometown of Chicago."

Watch out, Chicago — the Marvel Cinematic Universe has eyed the next city doomed to deal with collateral damage from superhero battles.

Disney+'s upcoming Ironheart series is taking the action to the metropolitan heart of the Midwest, and when series stars Dominique Thorne, Anthony Ramos, Alden Ehrenreich, Regan Aliyah, and Lyric Ross stopped by Entertainment Weekly's D23 2024 video suite to tease their new Marvel series, they revealed that Chicago plays a major role in the story.

Related: How Black Panther: Wakanda Forever introduces Dominique Thorne as Ironheart

"Once this show begins, we're definitely seeing the same girl that we got introduced to [in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever], but this time around we're getting a deeper dive," Thorne says in the video above, confirming that this series takes place after the events of the Black Panther sequel. "We're getting to kind of understand the things that created the woman that we got a preview of. But we're also seeing how those events are changing the way that she's viewing her whole schtick."

Thorne debuted in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as genius engineering student Riri Williams, who uses her brain and skills to build her own armored suit that would make Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) proud. Born and raised in Chicago, the teen was last seen returning to her studies as an MIT student, leaving her suit behind after the tragic events that killed Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett). And now, Thorne reveals Riri is going home when Ironheart begins.

"It's an invitation to explore her roots and her upbringing," Thorne adds. "We're taking it back to her hometown of Chicago, and a bit of a battle ensues as she's debating between or considering how she wants to use what she realizes is a powerful wealth of knowledge, realizing just how much genius she has in her, deciding what she's going to do with that. We see that play out in the environment when she gets back home as well — she has these options. Who and how am I going to use these things that I now know about myself?"

Her costar Ramos, who plays Riri's friend Parker Robbins a.k.a. the Hood, says that question is something all the characters will be asking themselves.

"We see this common thread between the characters as well where it's like, 'How much can I get? I get a little bit and I see how much I can do with this little bit, maybe if I get a little more I might be able to do a little more with that,'" Ramos adds. "And we see how that affects the characters positively and negatively. And then we start to see how the characters start to use each other to get ahead and to get more, whether that's more power, more something, more money. It's really cool to see that journey in how the characters start to interweave between one another's stories."

Cast member Regan Aliyah — whose character name has yet to be revealed — teases that all the characters have "complicated" relationships with one another, and Alden Ehrenreich — who also can't reveal who he's playing, naturally — says that's what appealed to him about joining the series.

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"The first meeting that I had about this show, one thing that they said was that the mandate for this show was a show where no one is clearly good or evil, that everybody was really complicated," he says. "The show really is like a psychological, emotional portrait of each of these characters, especially Riri, but really everybody. You get to see all kinds of stuff and it's a world we haven't seen before."

That's why Thorne is really excited to "take it to Chicago," since she's "never seen that in the MCU." And Ramos adds that the city is "a big character" in this show, especially since they changed his character Parker's backstory from the comics to be a native Chicagoan.

"Parker Robbins in the comics is from New York, but being able to flip his story and making him from Chicago, we made him from Humboldt Park, which has, obviously, a large Puerto Rican population," Ramos says. "We created this whole backstory with his mom being from the Young Lords and raising him that way. Chicago plays a huge part in the identity of all of our characters and the identity of this show, so I'm really excited for people to experience that. It was just a gift to be able to shoot there. It's an amazing city, one of the greatest cities in the world."

Ironheart is coming to Disney+ in 2025.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.