Score one for creative casting: Tracie Thoms in Wonder Woman Series

By Arturo R. García

Nice to see the team behind the new Wonder Woman show stepping outside “traditional” bounds here – it was announced earlier today that Tracie Thoms would be joining the cast as Etta Candy, personal assistant to the the Amazon superhero – more specifically to one of her secret identities, Diana Themyscira.

So far, reaction on Twitter has been positive, although you just knew somebody was gonna attempt to troll it up, and sure enough, here’s a comment from the thread at DC Women Kicking Ass:

wow they went from morbidly obese fat woman in the 40s and 50s, to the pudgey blond woman in the current (well formly current) series some random woman who looked like etta in the animated movie to this current woman? I’ve seen her in a horror movie before and she was killed and she’s blk this is going to cause a bit of backlash in the fandom world

That kind of reads like a set of derailment Mad Libs, doesn’t it? Luckily, this POV was quickly rebuffed in the thread. But we digress.

While writing my Chromatic Casting wish-list for the show, I expressed the hope that this version of the Etta character would, if the series indeed makes it off the ground, eventually hew closer to the version of Etta written by Gail Simone during her critically-acclaimed run on the Wonder Woman comic-book: not just an employee and ally of Diana’s, but a soldier and hero in her own right. That kind of versatility shouldn’t be a problem for Thoms, who had not only a memorable tenure playing Joanne in both the stage and motion-picture versions of Rent, but more than held her own in the heroic quartet in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. More recently, she played Detective Kat Miller on the CBS show Cold Cases, and she has signed on to be part of the rotating ensemble cast for FOR THE RECORD: Baz Luhrmann, a stage show that debuts this Saturday in Los Angeles.