Jessica Jones
"Jessica Jones" villain The Purple Man (David Tennant) was featured in some new footage to tease the upcoming series. Find out what the actor has to say about his morally questionable powers. Netflix

Marvel and Netflix showed the world how gritty and intense comic book-based TV shows can be with the 2015 release of “Daredevil.” Now, the series is hoping to strike fear into its viewer’s hearts once again with the release of “Jessica Jones” and the mysterious villain Zebediah Killgrave (David Tennant), aka The Purple Man.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, the actor opened up about making the switch from playing the hero of “Doctor Who” to this complicated, and often violent, villain from the pages of Marvel comic books. In addition, the outlet revealed some never-before-seen footage showcasing the bad guy’s powers in full.

Although he was already teased in the most recent trailer for the Nov. 20 Netflix series, the new video shows just how monstrous, and downright creepy, Tennant is making his villain. The video, posted below, opens with The Purple Man walking into a New York City apartment that isn’t his, only to show off his mind control powers by getting the husband and wife to accept him as their new indefinite guest. While it’s spooky to see a family succumb to his will so quickly, even going as far as to feed him their dinner, what’s perhaps the scariest is the way he heartlessly treats their child.

“Children should be seen and not heard. Or better still, not seen and not heard. Get into that closet,” he tells their son, after he protested at the villain’s rude decision to stomp on his toy car.

The boy complies and apparently sits in solitary confinement for an indeterminate amount of time. Unfortunately for the family, it doesn’t look like they’ll be stuck under Killgrave’s powers of suggestion for very long as the way he ominously cleans off his knife indicates that he doesn’t plan on letting his hosts stick around too long.

“He’s got this extraordinary ability that, whatever he tells people to do they are compelled to do. Which initially seems like a very straightforward fantasy concept, but actually it becomes, as you start to unpick it, quite complex morally,” Tennant tells the outlet in the video’s interview portion. “How do you cope with that? How can you tell if people are doing things because they want to or because you’re asking them to? How can you have any sense of what the world is and how the world should be if your world is particularly unique to you?”

In the second bit of new footage featured in the video, it’s implied that the character has already grappled with these moral questions and has chosen the self-serving route, as noted by ScreenRant. Killgrave is playing in what appears to be an underground poker game with some very rich-looking elite men. Obviously, given his powers of mind control, the hand goes his way as he subtly convinces each of the other players to bet their entire stack of cash (totaling to about $1 million) before convincing them to fold their cards. It’s unclear what the villain needs $1 million for, but odds are good it will spell trouble for Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) as she tries to get herself back in the superhero game.

Fans will just have to wait until Marvel’s “Jessica Jones” drops 13 brand new episodes all at once on Netflix on Nov. 20. After that, they can look forward to the next spinoff series, “Luke Cage,” followed by Season 2 of Marvel’s “Daredevil.”

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