Stella Meghie makes room for affection, humour and flawed people, and we value that patience. Her character-led approach serves Wonder Man well; the humour is less secure in the studio romance Everything, Everything.
Fi1m perspective
In Wonder Man (2026), the pleasure is watching Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley find a rhythm together. We warmed to them because the series gives their rapport enough space to make us care about the people within this superhero programme. Meghie directs alongside Destin Daniel Cretton, Tiffany Johnson and James Ponsoldt, keeping the emphasis on character. This warm, funny showbusiness comedy is a good fit for a director whose work returns so often to how people connect.
Her feature career began with the independent comedy-drama Jean of the Joneses (2016), which she wrote and directed. The studio romance Everything, Everything (2017) followed, before The Weekend (2018) returned her to independent filmmaking. Those moves between independent and studio work have not displaced her interest in Black characters, family history and reconnection. She favours women who are allowed to be flawed, while her romances avoid asking us to believe that a badly behaved man will improve if someone loves him enough.
The Photograph (2020), an original story inspired by family reconnection, brought those interests into a romance starring Issa Rae and LaKeith Stanfield. Her collaboration with Rae draws on her strength in directing emotionally complicated scenes, a useful quality when family history enters a love story. The caution is Everything, Everything, where the humour and quirk of the source novel did not fully survive the move to the screen. That film needed a surer comic tone.
With Wonder Man, we should be careful about assigning every success to one director among four. What we can say is that the space given to its actors fits Meghie’s interests, and the series benefits from that patience. Its characters have interests beyond preventing catastrophe, which is welcome without amounting to a reinvention of superhero television. The industry satire could be sharper, but there is enough feeling to justify the smaller scale. Start here for Abdul-Mateen and Kingsley, rather than an unsparing account of their profession.
Biography
Stella Meghie is a Canadian film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Toronto, she studied writing at the University of Waterloo and screenwriting at the University of Westminster.
She made her feature debut with Jean of the Joneses (2016), which she also wrote and produced. Subsequent films include Everything, Everything (2017), The Weekend (2018) and The Photograph (2020), the last two of which she also wrote. She has directed episodes of television series including Insecure, Grown-ish, First Wives Club and Minx.
Meghie was nominated for Best First Screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards for Jean of the Joneses and has received further nominations from the Canadian Screen Awards and NAACP Image Awards. She is attached to direct episodes of the Disney+ series Wonder Man (2026).
