“There’s something about the duality of a woman occupying two different bodies,” says Maslany, who played multiple clones during her Emmy-winning stint on Orphan Black.

“Culturally, we’re so obsessed with women’s bodies in terms of control, projection, ownership, aesthetic, all of this stuff.

“Exploring that feels very prescient, and [it is] very rife with interesting nuance.”

After accidentally being exposed to the blood of her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), aka the Hulk, Jen gains similar transformative abilities and becomes a bit of a celebrity.

Her firm assigns She-Hulk to head up a new superhuman law division, representing colourful MCU clients including monstrous Hulk foe Abomination (Tim Roth) and magic man Wong (Benedict Wong).

Meanwhile, Bruce – who spent the early Marvel movies grappling with the Hulk for control of his body – believes Jen should answer the call to be a superhero, and provides a crash course on being an Avenger. Or, as Maslany puts it, “mansplain to her how to be a Hulk”.

After Hawkeye and Wandavision, TV takes centre stage in the MCU

“Her struggle is different than Bruce’s because hers is so much more internalised,” says creator and writer Jessica Gao (Rick and Morty). “It really is about her wrestling with her identity and what it means to see people change how they treat her vs. how they treat She-Hulk.”

To play Jen’s suit-ripping, computer-generated Hulk side, Maslany donned a motion-capture outfit akin to Ruffalo’s.

“He and I talked about how bizarre that suit is,” she says. Wearing it, “nothing about you feels like a superhero so there’s also an outsider feeling, which is sort of what the Hulk’s place in [the Avengers] is”.

Maslany also enjoyed employing Jen’s “irreverent” sense of humour in the action scenes. “She-Hulk is not a trained fighter; ultimately, she’s Jen in a huge body that’s able to flick somebody and they go flying through a wall. She doesn’t fight cool.”

Anu Valia, who directed three of the show’s nine episodes, was impressed that Maslany “never for a moment forgot the body she was in”.

“She was always just very aware of what She-Hulk’s frame would feel like and how she moves, [that] she is more confident and she’s funnier.”

The comic-book She-Hulk, whose first appearance in 1980 came on the heels of the hit ’70s show The Incredible Hulk, has undergone several evolutions, and Marvel spent months developing what she would look like on screen.

“Yes, she has to be giant and green, but we also want her to still fit into the human world and be able to go to a restaurant on a date,” says executive producer/director Kat Coiro. “She stands out, but she doesn’t look like a monster who shouldn’t be there.”

While the show’s tone and vibe is influenced by Ally McBeal, Legally Blonde and Seinfeld, Gao went back to the She-Hulk comics she loved to find the right notes of meta commentary and pull in the title character’s arch-enemy, Titania.

A super-strong villainess with spikes and leather in Marvel mythology, the new television Titania (Jameela Jamil) is a social media influencer and “the antithesis of Jen”, Maslany says.

She is also “fixated” on the superhero lawyer, Gao adds. “She-Hulk is this sore spot for her, and there’s this fertile ground for why.”

With so many women in front of the camera and behind the scenes, “this show definitely has a female gaze to it”, Valia says.

Bringing in those different life experiences and perspectives – what Gao calls “this wonderful woven tapestry of femaleness” – has been “missing from this genre, and also from the MCU”.

And She-Hulk by design emphasises a more grounded look at superhero life that audiences rarely see in the high-stakes Marvel movies.

“On a Tuesday when the universe isn’t about to end, what’s doing laundry like?” Gao says. “You can be world famous, but you still have to pay the mortgage. You still have to clean your kitchen. You still have to call your mum.”