'Invincible' creator breaks down dimension-hopping finale fight with Angstrom Levy (2024)

Warning: This article containsspoilersforInvincible,season2, episode8.

This week, Mark Grayson met the multiverse.

As it turns out, the superhero world of Invincible has just as many parallel realities at play as DC or Marvel or Everything Everywhere All At Once. But in this animated series (based on the comic by Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley) only one character is able to access the multiverse. That would be Angstrom Levy, who unleashed the full extent of his dimension-hopping powers on Mark in Invincible’s season 2 finale.

As superhero movies have been finding out the hard way recently, multiverses are a double-edged sword. As exciting as parallel possibilities can be, they can also diminish the importance of the main characters we’ve been following for so long. Kirkman strove to do something else with Invincible’s multiverse.

“If I were to kill Mark Grayson and then have another Mark Grayson show up like ‘it’s okay, the show's about him now,’ everyone would be like, ‘well, nothing matters,’” Kirkman tells Entertainment Weekly. “So we limit our multiverse access to Angstrom Levy as a character. It’s not like there’s any infinite number of stories that could crop up. The multiverse is not coming from all these different directions.”

Instead, the multiverse of Invincible ends up emphasizing the protagonist’s unique aspects. Angstrom Levy has gone mad because, in almost every reality he’s visited, Invincible turned evil and joined his Viltrumite father in subjugating the Earth. But he takes out his rage on the only Mark who took Earth’s side.

“The Angstrom Levy storyline comes at a time when Mark is terrified that he could be becoming his father, that he could have those inherent Viltrumite traits baked into him, and there's nothing he can do about it,” Kirkman says. “So then he just happens to be fighting this villain who shows him, ‘yeah, you're not a great person in other dimensions, you follow in your father's footsteps,’ and his worst fears are actualized. It’s a cool villain hitting at the right time to key into our main theme of the season.”

What makes Levy a compelling villain is that his madness makes sense. He started out at the beginning of season 2 as a superpowered guy who could create dimensional portals, but then made the mistake of teaming up with the Mauler twins to access his parallel lives. In what started as an attempt to save Invincible from the Maulers, Levy created an accident that infused him with the memories of every version of Angstrom Levy — most of whom were viciously killed by Invincible and Omni-Man.

For all the visual spectacle of Levy’s portals, you need a good actor to pull off that emotional balance. Thankfully, Invincible cast Sterling K. Brown (who just earned his first Oscar nomination for American Fiction) in the role.

“We needed somebody for Angstrom that could play a very intelligent, kind, altruistic scientist and also the maniacal Mr. Hyde who seemed like the same guy, but was now suddenly crazed because of this experiment that had gone wrong,” Kirkman says. “He goes to some pretty crazy lengths, but there has to be sympathy for that guy because, at the end of the day, if you have Angstrom’s perspective and you've seen all the things that he's seen, he's kind of right. So to have an actor that can be as big a lunatic as Angstrom Levy has to be, but still have that small sense of, ‘oh, this poor guy, I can't believe he experienced all these things,’ that is an insanely difficult needle to thread. Sterling was just excellent at it.”

Brown isn’t the only fun bit of voice casting this season. In an adaptation of one of the comic’s funniest scenes, Mark met the creator of his favorite fictional comic, Science Dog. As in the original comic, the scene is a joke about lazy shortcuts that artists often use for visual storytelling. To make the sequence really come alive, the show cast I Think You Should Leave star Tim Robinson.

“I needed to find somebody that could carry the scene on their voice alone and be interesting and compelling. His record session was fantastic,” Kirkman remembers. “We had a lot of fun with him because he'd run through the whole scene, and then we'd be like, ‘how about a little crazier?’ And he'd run through the whole scene again. At the risk of angering him, I was like, ‘do it even crazier!’ He always had another place to go and was super into it, seemingly. I mean, he humored us at least. His craziest take made Filip Schaff seem like an absolute lunatic. I loved it, and I tried so hard to use it, but it just didn't work.”

Invincible season 2 is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.

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