Composer Stephanie Economou Subverts the Superhero Genre With Her Score of ‘Jupiter’s Legacy’

We have been steeped in superhero culture for so many years that it shocks us when something wholly original and exciting comes along. Netflix’s Jupiter’s Legacy, based on the graphic novel by Mark Millar, doesn’t hold its superheroes to an unbelievable, heroic standard but rather finds its most compelling conflicts in how they treat one another. Jupiter’s Legacy is not squeaky clean or totally wholesome. Composer Stephanie Economou didn’t look at Marvel or DC to forge her own path of her incredible music.

Legacy bounces back and forth from the present and the 1930s, and its non-linear structure draws the audience in. Who are these people? How did they get to become the superheroes we see flying through the sky? Economou was very much interested in identifying significant themes for these flawed people. Her introduction to Elena Kampouris’ troubled Chloe is particularly rad with electric guitars and an industrial sound.

Jupiter’s Legacy is not just a hero fantasy but a family drama and an adventure narrative all wrapped together. Economou’s music is epic but retains its intimacy throughout. There is a sequence towards the end of the season that is truly out of this world, and her careful precision makes this a worthy entry in any superhero canon.

While we don’t go into tons of spoilers in this interview, ADTV suggests you finish season one of Jupiter’s Legacy before reading this interview in its entirety. 

Awards Daily: Scoring a superhero series has to be a dream for a composer. What were you most excited for when you started work on Jupiter’s Legacy?

Stephanie Economou: I never thought what it would be like to score a superhero franchise or a narrative like that. I am very aware of the fatigue that has set in over the last ten years or so, so starting on Jupiter’s Legacy, it was a bit daunting. Just thinking of the associations that people have with music. I am not a big superhero person, but I didn’t want this to have any kind of ties to what people thought superhero music could sound like. I didn’t listen to any superhero scores while I was working on this and I tried to not watch any superhero content outside of this show. I think Jupiter’s Legacy is doing something very different and I wanted to have undivided attention to this story and to musically shape it. Having tunnel vision for that, I didn’t feel like I was limited to anything and I didn’t think it needed to fit a certain profile. I wanted to get into the heads of these characters and we are playing with a lot of time periods. It’s non-linear storytelling, so there’s a lot at play, and I knew the music was going to be a very important part. I fed off of the cinematography and the performances, and, because of that, the music was able to step out of what we think this kind of music should be.

AD: I love the theme music–it couples very well with the graphics on display–but I thought it had a mournful quality to it. 

SE: The main title, luckily, wasn’t something I had to do at the very start. Sometimes it’s very daunting to write a sequence like that and it’s very rare for composer to have to do that. A lot of the times it’s a five second stinger.

AD: Yeah.

SE: It could be like Lost where J. J. Abrams creates a sound design for the titles or it can be like Game of Thrones with a two and a half minute sequence. Its become less and less common so it was fun to do that. It was nice to do it after I had about four episodes already scored because I had the themes working and I had an idea where the music was conceptually going. The palette had been developed. That definitely informed the title music. That theme was what I originally wrote for Sheldon’s character and The Utopian, but as I kept scoring it, it became the theme of The Union and the morals that Sheldon embodies. They became the overarching themes of the show.

AD: Yeah, I can see how the theme fits with Sheldon’s morals. 

SE: Talking about the trope of superheroes, I think The Utopian is that hero figure. Sometimes you will hear it on a French horn or brass–which is a very stereotypical superhero sound–and I did that intentionally since we see him as this mythic figure. But I did that intentionally to subvert expectations since we often see him as a broken down man who is struggling with his relationships with his wife and his children. We have these moments where he is a hero, but then we hear the theme on a very intimate guitar or piano or synth. That’s kind of where the theme came from since that’s who his character really is. We have this façade of The Utopian and who he thinks he is, but the reality is much grittier and real. That’s what ended up in the sequence but on a really big scale. Since it ended with that big symphonic orchestra and the choir, I was really influenced by the visuals of the sequence. It’s a really creative nod to the graphic novel series and the lighting is very interesting. I timed the music to these cuts when moving from character to character. After I had written and signed off on it, the artist came back and wanted to tweak some of the images in the pictures so that it helped hit harder with the music. That’s something I never experience before and it was really rewarding to have someone want to go back and tweak their work to make it more concise and cohesive together. That was a fun experience.

AD: The music really reinforced how a character like The Utopian has been doing his job. The strength he’s put into it. 

SE: Definitely.

AD: You wrote a theme for Chloe’s character that I really loved. It really revs you up with the electric guitars, and that section has such an unexpected quality to it which totally fits in with her character. It’s unpredictable like Chloe is, and she’s one of the best characters. 

SE: I had the most fun writing that one. The first scene I wrote for her is when we see her use her powers as an adult and she gets into this fight with Hutch’s gang and the van chase. Chloe is one of the best character. She’s the outliers, the rebel–she has these powers and refuses to use them in a way that her father thinks they should be used. She’s got a lot of darkness with her drug addiction adn she’s battling a lot. I felt really compelled to write something different for her–her character demands it.

AD: It does. I totally agree. 

SE: I wasn’t sure what was going to come out when I sat down to write it and out came this industrial rock kind of theme with these blaring guitars. It just fit her. She’s rugged, tough, and bold. Episode four gets dark for her as we see her spiral into drug addiction. Rock isn’t the best fit for those kinds of scenes, but her theme got to contract and we hear it on a piano or something like that. It’s the same notes but it’s brought down to an intimate, fragile level. Being able to have a theme that could do both was great. Sometimes it’s on an electric bass where she’s beating someone up, but it was especially fun to give her that hard rock theme.

AD: The music really reinforces that she’s a character with something to prove. 

SE: Yes. Totally.

AD: The last cue I wanted to ask about is titled, “Illumination.” It’s a very pivotal moment towards the very end of the show, and the music has a lot propulsive movement. There is also a twinkling quality that stuck out to me. 

SE: That was a creative challenge. They all become trapped in this rock formation and they have to work together to get out. Sheldon and George walk up to the wall and these lights go up. Our showrunner, Sang Kyu Kim, wanted each person to have a different tone when they touched the wall.

AD: I loved that part. 

SE: He didn’t want it to be sound design–he wanted musical tones. He referenced Close Encounters of the Third Kind a lot. I was excited to rise to the challenge to do something like that. It’s creating diegetic sound but there’s score underneath. How does it all marry? I didn’t want to give each person a random tone. We are in episode seven at this point and everyone has themes that I’ve been establishing throughout the entire season, so why not take a little of a micro chasm of each theme and put it in. That’s a very composer-y thing to do. When Sheldon touches the wall, the first two notes of his horn theme come out, and Grace has a violin harmonic, so you hear that. Each of them have that and when only a few of them are touching the wall, the tones are hanging in the air but they aren’t completely harmonious. They don’t all sound right until they all get there and it comes this major chord. Then I had to figure out what to do with it once they were all playing, and I decided to make it part of the score cue as it grows. Their individual light tones I turned into a cycling arpeggio.

AD: Oh, so that’s what I was hearing. 

SE:  Yes. There’s these tones that I added a shimmer effect to and all these tones become this wash of sound as they move beyond the light. It was really fun to blur the lines of what is sound design and what is score and taking onscreen sound and make it part of the underscore to make it feel like a cohesive piece.

AD: You took words from the original graphic novel and you translated it into Latin for a choral piece in the score. Tell me why it was so important to you to go back to the original text. 

SE: It felt like it would’ve been meaningful to do that. I decided from the beginning that this big moment in episode seven after the rock wall sequence where they are granted their powers that it demanded something bold. It’s a big moment in the show.

AD: Very. 

SE: It’s this big, bizarre moment in the series and I was talking about it with the producers and spotting it with music. I had seen the series before I started scoring it and it’s such a pinnacle moment of the season. What if it was a big chorale using the theme? I hadn’t written it by then, but it was a choice I made. Making that conceptual decision from the start, I could prepare the audience for that. Vocals became a tapestry of the score in a very subtle way. I recorded  lot of modules of Latin chanting or detuned vocals as we see Sheldon spiral down this journey. The seeds are always there and it’s very subliminal for the audience. When we get to that big moment, the audience can see that it has been teased all along.

AD: I was doing some research on composers who typically work on these kinds of films…and it’s all dudes. 

SE: Yeah, it’s a lot of men.

AD: It’s a very “masculine” genre–it’s mostly dominated by male-centered stories–but there has only been one female composer for a major Marvel film. 

SE: Yeah.

AD: Is that something you are conscious of or is that something you wanted to intentionally help break down? I hate asking about it but I feel like we need to keep bringing it up. 

SE: I wonder if that’s part of the unconscious reason why I didn’t want to listen to other scores before I started on Jupiter’s Legacy. Some of those scores are excellent but I wanted to do something based on the story and something that was very singular to me. A lot of them end up being really similar sounding. Some of them step out of the box but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there’s a lot of scores that end up sounding similar. When you have a lack of diverse voices, you end up with similar products. When you involve people from a different perspective–whether it be a woman or a person of color or someone from a band background or a different world–you bring in something unique. Isn’t that what you want? Jupiter’s Legacy does something totally different and maybe part of the reason I was hired is because I had never done music for this genre before. We need more voices like that to change the shape of this industry. It can feel like the same prototype over and over again. Natalie Hoult is working on Loki and I can guarantee that she is going to do something unique.

AD: Yeah. 

SE: Coming into this overly masculine industry, I try to not think about it too much and it’s always there. It doesn’t help what I do creatively to constantly be thinking about it. Jupiter’s Legacy has some really amazing female characters in Chloe, Grace, and Raikou. I am most proud about the music I wrote for them. There is an element to writing deep, three-dimensional character and then having a woman see those characters and being inspired by them.

Volume One of Jupiter’s Legacy is streaming now on Netflix.