The premiere episode of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” has finally answered an important MCU question: Was Steve Rogers a virgin? The answer: No. Or as Jennifer Walters puts it after she cons the information out of her cousin Bruce, “Captain America fuuuuu–!
And according to head writer Jessica Gao, we got that answer because she and the writers room wanted to know just as much as fans did.
“I mean, I feel like this is a question that has happened in probably every friend group that watches Marvel movies together,” Gao explained to TheWrap. “Like, I’ve certainly asked that question. Most of the writers in our writers room have thought about it. We all talked about it at length, there was a lot of spirited and passionate debate, a lot of play-acting, a lot of riffing and charades about it. And it just seems like the kind of thing that you know, if Captain America — Steve Rogers — existed in our world, that’s what everybody would want to know.”
The question is posed in the first five minutes of the episode, now streaming on Disney+, as Jen Walters (Tatiana Maslany) is reunited with her cousin, Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Apparently, Captain America’s virginity is something she’s thought about quite a bit, and she’s pretty convinced he’s a virgin. Unfortunately, they run off the road after nearly crashing into a spaceship before Jen can get an answer.
The ship, if you’re wondering, is a “Sakaaran class A courier craft, probably trying to deliver a message,” to be specific, something Bruce explains later in the episode, and the matter of Steve Rogers’ sex life isn’t brought up again — until the episode’s post-credits scene (which, brace yourself, there’s one in every episode). In it, Jen appears to be drunk as she cries about how sad it is that Captain America died a virgin after everything he did for the world. Finally, Bruce gives in, and reveals that Steve Rogers was in fact, not a virgin. He had sex on a USO tour, before he was frozen. At that, Jen immediately reveals she’s not actually drunk, and loudly cheers over finally having an answer.
According to Gao, Jen’s curiosity about Cap actually started as a longer-running bit, meant to pop up in every episode of the show. Whenever Jen wasn’t being a lawyer or Hulking out, she was fixated on Cap’s virginity. That throughline only went away because, after hearing how the writers debated the topic at length, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige himself decided that a definitive answer should be given explicitly.
“Kevin was actually the one who was like, ‘Oh, we should answer that. And I will tell you the answer.’ And I said, ‘There’s an answer?!’ And he goes, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s an answer.’ And he told me this,” Gao recalled. “So this is canon from Kevin Feige’s golden tongue. This is canon.”
Really, it didn’t take a whole lot of convincing for Feige to even want to give up that answer. Once he realized people wanted to know, he offered it up readily.
“This is the wonderful thing about Kevin is that he always will push you to go further, rather than rein you back and give you boundaries,” Gao said. “He always pushes you further, to a place where you didn’t even think to ask because you didn’t think it was in the realm of possibility.”
Obviously, Gao is excited about a lot that happens in “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.” But at the end of the day, if the only takeaway is that Captain America had sex, she’s just fine.
“If that is my legacy, I’m very happy,” she said.
“She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” is now streaming on Disney+.