Javier Grillo-Marxuach on ‘The 100,’ Lexa, and Vampire Elvises [Exclusive Interview]

Javier “Javi” Grillo-Marxuach knows his way around a writers’ room.

The chances are high that you’ve watched at least one show that he’s written for or produced, particularly if you’re a fan of genre TV.

Iconic and long-running shows such as The 100, Lost, Charmed, Law and Order: SVU, and Medium are among his credits, as well as gone-too-soon cult favorites like The Middleman (which Grillo-Marxuach developed, based on the comic book series of the same name that he created with Les McClaine).

I had the opportunity to sit down with Grillo-Marxuach during the ATX Television Festival in early June. We chatted about The 100, fan outcry in response to Lexa’s death, the intersection of social media and fandom, his upcoming Xena: Warrior Princess reboot, and more.

Recently, Grillo-Marxuach has become heavily associated with the backlash in response to the death of the prominent fan-favorite character Lexa, a lesbian character on The 100 who was killed by a stray bullet in an unfortunate evocation of the “Bury Your Gays” trope, because he wrote the episode in which she died.

Since then, Grillo-Marxuach has been extremely vocal in discussing the trope and interacting with fans online. He was even a panelist in the “Bury Your Tropes” panel at ATX (and you can find our write-up of that panel here).

When asked if he had anticipated the enormity of the outcry following Lexa’s death (which he called “a really unfortunate confluence of creative decisions that had the wrong and most unintended impact that could have been avoided, but weren’t”), Grillo-Marxuach reiterated much of what he’d already said in communicating with fans and viewers on his Tumblr page: that he and the others in The 100 writers’ room were aware of the trope but hoped that they could find a way to tell the story that needed to be told in a non-harmful way.

“I think my mindset going into the airing of that episode was the hope that we had rendered the story in a way that would transcend this trope. If you look at my behavior online leading up to the episode, and even during the showing of the episode, it was the behavior of somebody who truly wanted it to work. That much said, a lot of us knew that this is an issue, a lot of us understood why this is an issue,” he explained.

In fact, Grillo-Marxuach, in particular, was extremely familiar with the trope.

“My wife was actually producing a web series about the lives of trans and queer women in Los Angeles during the time I was writing on The 100, and I’m a friend of Amber Benson and — you know, she’s Tara Maclay, she’s the original shot by the stray bullet girl. It’s not as if I was not aware of the pitfalls of where we were going. You hope and pray that you can give a voice to the story that your showrunner wants to tell in a way that isn’t going to be injurious, and what you’re ultimately seeing [here] is that a group of people who had the best narrative inventions created an outcome that sadly hurt a lot of people.”

Grillo-Marxuach did mention a silver lining, of sorts — the over $120,000 that the LGBTQ+ community raised for the Trevor Project (a non-profit foundation focusing on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth).

“I don’t take credit for that. I’m not happy that that had to happen the way that it did. Would it have been better if that $120,000 had been raised for the Trevor Project just out of some great outpouring of beneficence? Not in protest of an episode that has my name on it? I mean, nobody wants that.”

Most apparently, Grillo-Marxuach was grateful for all of the viewers who took the time to speak with him online, following Lexa’s death.

“The good news is that they were very vocal, they did some amazing things to raise awareness, and the hot button issue right now seems to be, is social media toxic? Is fan culture toxic? I don’t believe that it is,” he emphasized.

“For me, personally, my response to this was to engage fully and to listen actively and to commit in a way that was respectful to the anger that was being expressed. And I think that a lot of the people with whom I wound up talking were really able to speak to me, once the anger subsided, were really able to speak very frankly about the issues that were involved.”

Of course, he was all too aware of the aggravation many members of a minority community face when in a situation where the burden is on them to explain things to a person outside of their community and experience.

“There are so many people who are sick of educating people like me,” he said.

“As a member of a minority, I understand that. I don’t like telling people that singing that song from West Side Story to me when they find out I’m Puerto Rican is not funny. I don’t like to be the person who tells somebody who thinks that’s just the fucking most hilarious thing ever that, really, I’ve heard it, it’s not funny, and fuck off. So I get it, and I get it because as a member of a minority, I grew up during a time when you had to accept those things, because what were we going to do?  Write a nasty letter to the network? The thing where I feel that this [Lexa situation] is a very different situation is that, because of social media, the fans do have that voice.”

Grillo-Marxuach was cognizant of the significant impact the storyline had on the community, but hopeful that in the aftermath, a better and more representative television landscape could rise up.

“In the aftermath of an explosion, there is room for new things to take the place of what was blown up, and maybe the things that will take the place of that will be good things. There’s a little bit of hope in that. And, look, I don’t want to be arrogant and say, ‘Oh TV is changing things!’ or to be taking credit for anything. But this explosion has created a space where something good might take the place of the void that’s been created. I hope so.”

Despite the backlash, Grillo-Marxuach firmly disagrees with the idea that fandom is toxic, a notion put forth in a viral article by Devin Faraci. “I adore Devin Faraci, I’ve met him a few times. I have followed him since he wrote on Chud. Devin is a brilliant writer and a provocateur. In this one, I’m just not in agreement with him,” he said.

He likened some of the more vocal TV fans to sports fans. “I don’t think fandom is broken. I think that as sci-fi and genre fandom become more mainstream, more densely populated, and the tools of social media become more of a constant background hum, I think the fans are becoming like sports fans. You know, they go to the game, and they heckle. And, by the way, when people talk to me about toxic fandom, that’s always my response: have you met sports fans?”

He also put the onus on writers and showrunners who choose to engage in social media.

“Honestly, I think that we as creators are a little too thin-skinned and a little too narcissistic in our desire to engage in it for the praise and then be shocked — shocked! — that there’s a negative side to it. If you step into a river knowing you can’t change the course of that river and you don’t know where the river is going to go — and that’s what a writer does who enters social media,” he said.

“How many actors, producers, directors have you looked at in interviews that say ‘I don’t read the reviews’? Tons of them. It’s a choice! You can choose not to go on social media. If you think fandom is broken so much, and you hate fandom, and you think the fans are too entitled, and defensive, and all that — don’t go.”

Grillo-Marxuach spoke highly of social media and fan interaction, calling it part of his process. “I think a lot of writers feel like they are pushed to reckon with their fans. And one of the things I tell a lot of writers is you don’t have to be on social media. You don’t have to interact with anyone. I choose to. Because I like the noise. For me, the chaos of fandom is invigorating.”

On the flip side, he acknowledged that not all writers feel that way about fandom. “A lot of people need their silence and I respect that,” he said. “I think that is a position that you respect. If you’re the kind of writer who wants to be reclusive, be reclusive.”

After the response to Lexa’s death, Grillo-Marxuach was not comfortable with offering apologies.

“There was actually something that happened during that first 24 hours [after the episode’s airing]. I got into a conversation, into a Tumblr chat session, with somebody — I still don’t know who she is or how old she is or anything like that — and that person was telling me, ‘You need to apologize.’ And I kept saying I can’t apologize, and I won’t apologize, because I would feel that that would be a betrayal of the people with whom I’ve been in the trenches for the last year. And for any number of other reasons.”

He also felt that an apology might not necessarily be what’s needed or wanted, in a fight. “When I look at my relationship with my wife and we have a fight, when I look at my relationship with my friends and we have a fight, or with my parents or whoever, what do I want? I don’t want to be necessarily agreed with or told I’m right or whatever,” he said. “I want to be understood. I think that’s a primal human need.”

Grillo-Marxuach, notably one of the first people out of The 100 camp to actively engage in the response to Lexa’s death episode, felt that responding to the outraged and distraught fandom (“no differently than I would approach an argument with a loved one”) was simply the decent thing to do.

“Decency is a value that can be taught more in the world,” he noted. “Whether the injury was intended or not, whether I was malicious or not, this bad thing happened.”

“At the end of the day — I have a huge amount of societal privilege. Most people who would look at me would say that I’m white. My minority status is not something that I wear outwardly because I’m very light-skinned, and I look the way I do. Even though I’m Puerto Rican — I was born on the island, and English is my second language — I’m in a position of privilege because of that, I’m in a position of privilege because of my job and the position I occupy in the popular culture,” Grillo-Marxuach said.

“I just figured, what do I actually have to lose by listening [to the fans]? It’s not going to make me less creative. It’s not going to make me less of who I am…. The only real debit here might be to my pride, and who gives a fuck about my pride?”

Perhaps Grillo-Marxuach is more tuned into fandom than your average writer because he himself was an active participant in various fandoms.

“Fandom affected me so much. I am a Star Wars fanatic, I am a Star Trek fanatic, I was one of those kids who went to conventions. These things are important to me. Star Wars changed my life. It’s what made me want to do what I do. So I know really well how the community experience of fandom affects people and how the stuff you write affects people.”

When discussing his upcoming Xena reboot — which he is working on with Rob Tapert and NBC Universal and which is in the early project-in-development stage — he recalled an experience he had with the Xena fandom at the 20th and final Xena Convention in Burbank.

“They did their 20th convention last year, and that was the last one, they did a farewell convention. Well, a lot of the fans decided that they were not going to take that lying down and they did a Xenite retreat and they rented a ranch outside of LA and a good number of them — about a hundred of them — came early to LA and stayed at the same hotel where the convention was being held. And I was in touch with a couple of them over social media and again, how cool is that, right? I said, ‘Hey, if you guys are hanging out, I’ll go drink bourbon with a bunch Xenites.’ Why not? It was awesome.”

He cited this experience as a moment that really helped him home in his focus in writing the script for the reboot. “We all sat down and a bunch of us in little groups just chatted for three or four hours,” he recalled.

“I was a fan of the show from when it aired in syndication in the ’90s, as a genre fan, so I know the show really well. I knew the fandom really well. But it always helps when you sit with people who love a property that you’re working on to understand the impact that it’s had on their lives. It focuses you on what is important about that property.”

Grillo-Marxuach’s family also sponsors a fellowship at the University of Southern California, for underrepresented voices within the entertainment industry.

“My father [a retired oncologist] created an endowment through an organization called Hope Funds that basically is going to fund a postdoc [for cancer research] in perpetuity. So every year, there’ll be a new postdoc that will basically be funded by this foundation and the Hope Funds is about looking for cures and doing basic science research that can be used toward the treatment of cancer. So I got into a discussion with my parents about other ways that the foundation might be able to help.”

Together, they came up with the idea for their USC MFA Writing for Screen and Television program Fellowship. “When I was growing up in Puerto Rico, the idea of being a television writer — I might as well have wanted to be an astronaut. Or an ice road trucker,” he laughed.

“Honestly, it just comes out of a primal urge — the adult that you become should always in some metaphorical way be out to rescue the child that you never were. Or maybe the child that you were some of the time, or maybe the child that you thought you were at your worst. So I was talking to my parents about this, and I said it would be really cool if there could be a scholarship for somebody who was like me, a Latino who wants to become a screenwriter.”

Grillo-Marxuach is big on mentorship and mentioned his admiration of Michael Piller, a showrunner of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who had an open submission policy while there. “One of the things that Jose and I talk about on our podcast [Children of Tendu] is our favorite show runner, a man named Michael Piller. Piller came in to showrun Star Trek: The Next Generation in its third season,” he said.

“He was a guy who believed very strongly in teaching the writers who came up under him. He was a guy who believed very strongly in mentorship.”

“To me, the sign of a great showrunner isn’t just the cultural footprint that their work leaves, but also the number of people that they train to do the job well,” he said, citing Ron Moore (of Battlestar Galactica and Outlander), Naren Shankar (of The Expanse and CSI), and René Echevarria (of Medium and Dark Angel) as a few of the accomplished writers and showrunners who came up under Piller’s mentorship at Star Trek: TNG.

Given the many shows that he has worked on, when I asked about a favorite episode that he’s written, I expected him to have to think about it for a bit. But he answered almost instantly: “The King is Undead,” written while a staff writer on the short-lived 2001 Sci-Fi series The Chronicle.

“It was the year that 24 was developed. So 24 wasn’t out yet, but it was going to be on the air. We got a VHS tape of the pilot because, back then, you’d always get the pilots and bootlegs to see what the competition was doing. So I looked at 24, and I went to Silvio [Horta, the showrunner], and I said, ‘Silvio, this is amazing and everybody is going to be parodying this. We need to kick the shit out of this,'” he remembered.

“I don’t know how we got the network to agree to it, but we basically did an episode that was a real-time parody of 24 that was at a convention of Elvis impersonators that happened to have been infiltrated by vampire Elvis impersonators who wanted to kill all of the Elvis impersonators. And it is literally like — I could have died after writing that and been like, ‘I’ve done my part — I’ve made the world a better place,'” he said, laughing.

Keep an eye out here at Tell-Tale TV for news on the highly anticipated upcoming Xena: Warrior Princess reboot, and check out Children of Tendu, the podcast run by Grillo-Marxuach alongside fellow TV scribe Jose Molina.

You can check out all of our coverage of the ATX Television Festival right here. (There is still more to come!)