Marvel 'Eternals' Writer Patrick Burleigh Drew Inspiration For Sprite From His Experience Being A Child In A Teenager's Body
Marvel's Eternals is definitely a polarizing movie, a departure from the action-filled, morally compact stories that we're used to getting from Marvel (and Disney as a whole.) The film not only saw periods where action was pushed to the side in favor of philosophical debate, it also left viewers wondering if the debate was even solved - or even had an answer at all.
This seems to be the first attempt since Civil War at a Marvel film that doesn't end up condoning one stance on so-called "superhero work" over another, and it did so by introducing us to a number of characters with vastly different experiences all at the same time.
One of those characters is Sprite (Lia McHugh). In a group of people clearly made up to try and represent several of the walks of life humans must cover, Sprite definitely got one of the shortest sticks: She's 7,000 years old, but she's stuck in the body of a barely-pubescent teenager forever. This creates problems for her, especially romantically, and she is portrayed as quite a lonely character throughout the film.
As it turns out, this character actually got a great deal of inspiration from one of the writers working with the amazing Chloe Zhao on the Eternals script. Patrick Burleigh, one of the writers behind Ant-Man and The Wasp, didn't know what it was like to be an adult trapped in the body of a child - but he did know what it was like to be a child trapped in the body of an adult.
Burleigh was born with something called Precocious Puberty syndrome, or testotoxicosis. This syndrome is caused by a mutant gene that triggers people assigned male at birth to start going through puberty early - which, for the men in Burleigh's family, meant about two years old.
"The result is premature everything" the screenwriter explained in an essay he wrote for The Cut in 2019. "Bone growth, muscle development, body hair, the full menu of dramatic physical changes that accompany puberty. Only instead of being 13, you're 2."
These experiences definitely shaped how Burleigh wrote all the characters in Eternals, but especially Sprite. He told the Hollywood Reporter:
"I loved comic books growing up. I always connected with those characters...Part of what is so heroic about that is they overcome their outsider status to do something for the greater good," he explained in a recent interview.
"I would say that of all the characters in the Eternals, although it's the inverse of what I went through as a child - which, I was a child trapped in a much older body - but Sprite is a 7,000-year-old trapped in the body of a child. That in particular was a dilemma that I connected with as we were writing. That sense of otherness and the kind of angst that emerges from that."
Sprite is one of the characters who makes the most questionable decision in the movie, following her own heart instead of engaging in the moral debate unfolding around her. She comes at the problem from an entirely different perspective from any of the characters - not withdrawing, but also not really participating in what was going on.
It will be interesting to see where her character goes from the end of the film (which, no spoilers, changes things for her big-time) if she shows up in any future Marvel ventures - and here's hoping that when she does, Patrick Burleigh is around to write for her.
Marvel's Eternals is out now, in theaters and on Disney+.
