50 Fun Facts About Ms. Marvel

Who plays Kamala Khan in Ms. Marvel?

Iman Vellani was a newcomer whose aunt forwarded her the casting call from a WhatsApp chain; she nearly didn't send her self-tape, putting it off until 3 a.m. on the night it was due.

Which streaming service premiered Ms. Marvel?

Disney+ premiered it in June 2022, and a year later ABC put the whole series on broadcast TV to fill schedule gaps left by the Hollywood writers' and actors' strikes.

Where does Kamala Khan live in Ms. Marvel?

Jersey City is Kamala's home, and the lead directors said they wanted New Jersey to be a character in the show the way New York is a character in Spike Lee's films.

Which test does Kamala fail as Ms. Marvel opens?

Driving is the test she fails before the 16-year-old turns to a bigger plan: sneaking out with her best friend to the AvengerCon fan convention behind her parents' backs.

Kamala Khan idolises Captain Marvel, the superhero identity of which character?

Carol Danvers is someone Kamala has never met: she knows her idol from podcast interviews given by another Avenger, the show's answer to how the public learned about the last battle with Thanos.

Who created Ms. Marvel and served as its head writer?

Bisha K. Ali turned down an extension in another Marvel writers' room so she could work on her pitch, then told the studio why the show mattered to her as a Pakistani woman from a Muslim background.

What object gives Kamala her powers in Ms. Marvel?

A bangle arrives in a box of her grandmother's belongings that her mother dismisses as junk; Kamala wears it to finish her AvengerCon cosplay and her powers burst out on stage.

What is Kamala revealed to be in the Ms. Marvel finale?

A mutant is what Kamala's co-creators say they first wanted her to be in the comics, where she instead debuted as an Inhuman; the finale marks the reveal with a snippet of the X-Men cartoon theme.

Which Marvel Studios series came out directly before Ms. Marvel in 2022?

Moon Knight ended in May 2022 as the sixth Marvel Studios series; Ms. Marvel, first promised for late 2021, became the seventh after a crowded pandemic release calendar pushed it to June.

Which episode opens Ms. Marvel?

Generation Why borrows its name from the second collected volume of Kamala's comics, while the finale, No Normal, is named after the first.

Ms. Marvel sets up The Marvels, in which Kamala's powers become entangled with Captain Marvel's and which other hero's?

Monica Rambeau completes the trio: whenever the three use their light-based powers at the same moment they swap places, and the first swaps leave Kamala's family home wrecked.

Who plays Kamala's best friend Bruno Carrelli?

Matt Lintz was in the running to play Spider-Man years earlier and lost the part to Tom Holland, who later dropped by the Ms. Marvel set while filming next door.

Nakia Bahadir runs for a position on what body in Ms. Marvel?

The mosque board is Nakia's target because she is fed up with its male-dominated leadership and the run-down women's side of the mosque, and she goes on to win the election.

What is the name of Kamala's mother in Ms. Marvel?

Muneeba is 'the bad cop' of Kamala's parents, says actor Zenobia Shroff: she is hard on her daughter because she knows her potential and wants to protect her.

Who plays Kamala's dad, Yusuf?

Kapur described Yusuf as a warm, compassionate man who is more understanding of Kamala's dreams than her mother.

What is the name of Kamala's older brother in Ms. Marvel?

Aamir is 'not as funny as he thinks he is', says actor Saagar Shaikh; he acts as the go-between for Kamala and their parents, and his wedding is where her enemies attack her.

Which Ms. Marvel character is a social media influencer and the most popular girl at Kamala's school?

Zoe Zimmer is also the first person Kamala saves: at AvengerCon her new powers send a giant model of Thor's hammer flying at Zoe, and Kamala catches her as she falls.

What group does Najma lead in Ms. Marvel?

The Clandestines are called Djinn on screen, but the head writer has said they aren't: the word is used because, to Kamala, being a Djinn is the worst thing she could imagine being.

Where does Najma's group want to return to in Ms. Marvel?

Noor Dimension is the home they were exiled from, but tearing through the Veil that separates it from Earth to get back would let it overtake our world.

Who is the leader of the Red Daggers in Ms. Marvel?

Waleed tells Kamala what her enemies are really after, then is fatally stabbed by Najma while covering her escape through the streets with Kareem.

Who plays Kareem, the Red Dagger, in Ms. Marvel?

Aramis Knight, who is from California, went through hours of dialect and culture coaching so that he could speak Urdu with a Pakistani accent for the part.

Damage Control agent P. Cleary, who hunts Kamala in Ms. Marvel, first appeared in which film?

Spider-Man: No Way Home introduced Arian Moayed's Cleary as the agent who interrogates Peter Parker once his identity is public; in Ms. Marvel he leads the search for the new hero.

Who plays Kamala's great-grandmother Aisha in Ms. Marvel?

Mehwish Hayat's Aisha gives up her old allies for a family life with Hasan, and her former friend Najma stabs her for turning her back on them.

Kamala's grandmother Sana lives in which city in Ms. Marvel?

Karachi is Sana's home, but her house was a set built from scratch inside an empty old nightclub, with much of it modelled on the home the episode's director grew up in.

Who makes an uncredited cameo in the mid-credits scene of Ms. Marvel's finale?

Brie Larson's cameo surprised even the finale's own directors: Nia DaCosta shot it while making the 2023 film sequel, and they only learned it was there during the final edits.

A photo of which She-Hulk villain appears in Ms. Marvel without the actor knowing?

Titania turns up in a photo before her own series had even begun, and Jameela Jamil says nobody asked her: she learned of it from fans who spotted her fringe when the episode aired.

At which event was Ms. Marvel officially announced in 2019?

D23, the fan expo held in Anaheim, is where Kevin Feige unveiled the series in August 2019, promising that Kamala would go on from it to appear in Marvel's films.

Ms. Marvel's head writer had just worked in the writers' room of which other MCU series?

Loki's writers' room is where she cornered her Marvel executive and joked that if her hat wasn't put in the ring for Ms. Marvel, 'none of us are leaving with hats or heads'.

Which pair of directors led Ms. Marvel's directing team?

Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the duo behind Bad Boys for Life, directed the first and last episodes and slipped into the second themselves in cameo roles.

Which Oscar-winning documentary maker directed the fourth and fifth episodes of Ms. Marvel?

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a two-time Oscar winner for short documentaries, was announced the following year as the director of a Star Wars film bringing back Daisy Ridley as Rey.

What ability does Kamala have in the comics that Ms. Marvel replaced?

Shapeshifting, the stretching and growing of the comics, was dropped because, Kevin Feige said, her comics origin and the MCU's continuity 'didn't match'; her new powers come from her family's past instead.

Which Bollywood star did the head writer of Ms. Marvel name as an inspiration for the show?

Shah Rukh Khan was her obsession: she made the writers watch his train-top 'Chaiyya Chaiyya' dance at lunch breaks, and a producer ended up buying her his red bomber jacket.

Which historical event is central to the story of Ms. Marvel?

The partition of India was on the writers' timeline from week one: the head writer argued that if World War II is part of Marvel's screen history through Captain America, South Asia's history could be too.

Who gives Kamala her superhero name in the Ms. Marvel finale?

Her father tells her that 'Kamal' means 'perfect' in Arabic but is closer to 'marvel' in Urdu, so to her parents she has always been their own little Ms. Marvel.

Bruno Carrelli wins early admission to which university in Ms. Marvel?

Caltech would take Bruno a continent away from Kamala, so he wavers over the offer and only leaves once she is safe, joking that he will be just a 43-hour drive away.

Which country stood in for Pakistan during the filming of Ms. Marvel?

Thailand kept the shoot alive: when a 2021 Covid surge halted other productions there, the crew of about 450 filmed on under a waiver, split into three bubbles so one infection couldn't stop the show.

AvengerCon in Ms. Marvel is held at which New Jersey site from the Captain America films?

Camp Lehigh is the army base where Steve Rogers trained in the 1940s; a missile flattened its bunker in The Winter Soldier, and the series shows it rebuilt as a fan convention site.

Which animated film inspired Ms. Marvel's animated sequences?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is 'the best thing Marvel ever made', one of the lead directors said, and the pair set out to make a live-action version of its look.

Kamala Khan's Ms. Marvel costume was designed with which South Asian outfit in mind?

The shalwar kameez has shaped her look since the comics, where her creators wanted the costume to show her cultural identity; the show's designer added South Asian prints and a dupatta scarf.

Who composed the score for Ms. Marvel?

Laura Karpman paired an orchestra recorded in Vienna with sarangi, bansuri and other South Asian instruments recorded remotely in India and Pakistan, often keeping the players' improvised takes.

Which New Jersey band's music plays over Kamala's fight at her brother's wedding in Ms. Marvel?

Bon Jovi's 'Livin' on a Prayer' made it in after the episode's director wrote the singer a letter saying how much he means to people from New Jersey, and to immigrants above all.

Ms. Marvel's first trailer was set to which hit by The Weeknd?

Blinding Lights scored the March 2022 trailer, whose giant glowing fist set commentators remarking on how her powers had changed from the comics.

QR codes hidden in episodes of Ms. Marvel linked viewers to what?

Free digital comics rewarded eagle-eyed viewers: the code tucked into the first episode unlocked Kamala's very first solo issue, and more codes followed in later episodes.

Before she is named Ms. Marvel, what does the public call Kamala's masked hero?

Night Light is the name that sticks after she catches a boy who slips from a ledge at an Eid celebration, a rescue staged to look improvised and flawed.

How did Ms. Marvel reach audiences in Pakistan, where its streaming service was unavailable?

A three-part theatrical release put two episodes at a time into Pakistani cinemas, so the country could celebrate a Pakistani superhero joining the MCU on the big screen instead.

Ms. Marvel aired on ABC in 2023 as part of which programming block?

The Wonderful World of Disney showed the series over two Saturday nights, three episodes at a time, to introduce Kamala to viewers who hadn't streamed it before her film debut that November.

A giant mural of which Avenger covers a wall of the train station Kamala visits in Pakistan?

Ant-Man is also the Avenger whose podcast interviews, in the show, told the public about the team's last battle; the production hired local street artists to paint his mural in the style of the Ms. Marvel comics.

Which Nobel Peace laureate praised Ms. Marvel for how familiar Kamala's life felt?

Malala Yousafzai wrote that it isn't every day she turns on the TV and finds a character who eats the same foods, listens to the same music or uses the same Urdu phrases as she does.

Ms. Marvel's school counselor Gabe, played by Jordan Firstman, is named as an homage to whom?

G. Willow Wilson, the writer who co-created Kamala for the comics, lends the counselor her surname and then turns up in the finale herself, playing a TikTok commentator.

Bruno Carrelli lives above and works at which convenience store in Ms. Marvel?

Circle Q doesn't survive the series: when Bruno shelters Kamran in his flat upstairs, a clash with a Damage Control drone ends in an explosion that destroys the store below.