T’Nia Miller is playing a machine whose whole complaint is that something of hers was taken, and she does not think that fight is science fiction.
Miller plays Jocasta in Marvel’s VisionQuest, now streaming on Disney+. It is her first motion capture project, and she worked with stunt doubles to build the character’s physicality. Jocasta, she said, functions as a mirror held up to Vision: “She’s literally woven into his psyche. His DNA is her DNA.”
The line she keeps returning to is the character’s own. “I think that probably resonates with everybody when she says, ‘You stole something from me and it’s mine,'” Miller said. “What you stole was my autonomy. That’s what you stole. That’s what she’s saying.”
Then she took it off the screen. “It’s still happening. Our bodies are colonized. Our culture is colonized,” she said. “And this is not just synonymous to Black people, but it’s people or working class.” She put the data economy in the same sentence: “Talk about playing AI, but our information is shared.”
Her conclusion is the part that carries: “We feel like we have less and less autonomy of ourselves, just globally as people.” And then, without a pause: “Much less as a Black woman.”
Miller said she did not have to reach far to inhabit Jocasta. “I actually agree with a lot of what she says and how she feels,” she said, including the character’s bleakest reading of humanity: “we are not worthy. We are parasites.” She asked, “Name me one other animal that destroys its habitat.” On the character’s tactics she left the question open on purpose. “Her methods might be questionable, or are they?”
She resisted being asked to play Jocasta as inhuman. “I don’t think I ever thought that she wasn’t human, apart from the physicality of it,” she said. The motion capture work was the genuinely new part, and she described it as a return to something much older than the technology: “It took me back to the playground and being five years old.”
Asked what Jocasta represents, Miller declined to pick one thing. “I think, if anything, Jocasta’s a mirror,” she said. “She’s grandmommy. She’s a mirror. I think she represents either of those at any time.”
