My coworker spoke with @ShannonPurser7 about wanting to play Squirrel Girl and I am 1000% here for it! https://t.co/OMDr0BIIMO — Victoria McNally (@vqnerdballs) August 4, 2016

Not to be a hater, but when I first heard about Anna Kendrick expressing an interest in playing the amazing Doreen Green, aka Squirrel Girl, in a hypothetical Marvel movie, my gut reaction was “Sorry, but NOPE.” While she’s super-talented and can pull off comedy effortlessly, she doesn’t have that “outsider” quality that is so important for our favorite girl with the powers of a squirrel. Enter Stranger Things star, Shannon Purser.

Purser has already tweeted her interest in playing the character, which already raises her in my estimation, because the desire came from her (comics and cosplay nerd that she is), she didn’t have to be told about the character.

However, in a recent interview with Revelist, she talks about, among other things, why Squirrel Girl would be a dream role for her to play:

“I think Squirrel Girl is just adorable but at the same time is totally boss and completely awesome. I think people need a character like that. It’s easy in the superhero realm to feel like a lot of the female superheroes we see are grown women who are super responsible and know what their purpose is and that kind of thing. Squirrel Girl is a little bit younger and like a real person, trying to figure out her life and then also having to save the world. I love that.”

Who knows if and when a Squirrel Girl movie will actually get made? The MCU calendar is already pretty much spoken for through 2020 though, according to Den of Geek, there are three “untitled” films scheduled for that year. Could one of them be a Squirrel Girl solo film that’s given the Deadpool treatment, except way less profane and gross? I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

If it is, I think Purser would be an amazing choice. Not only does she look the part, but she’s a relative unknown save Stranger Things, and she’d still be the right age to play a college-age computer science student in a couple of years, which would allow people to really get to know the character as she currently exists in comics. More importantly, though, Purser naturally has that outsider, earnest, geeky quality about her that is firmly at the heart of Doreen Green. If she uttered the words “I eat nuts and kick butts,” I’d totally believe her.

(via Victoria McNally on Twitter, featured image via screenshot)

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