Phase Zero
Characters

Kilgrave

The man in the purple suit

Kevin ThompsonDefendersEarth-616

A man whose voice cannot be refused, which the series treats not as a superpower but as a description of an abuser.

Kevin Thompson, who renamed himself Kilgrave, is a man from Jessica Jones’s past who can control minds and whose reappearance takes her life apart. He was born with a neural disease and experimented on as a young child, which left him with an airborne virus that gives him his power.

David Tennant plays him as charming, funny and entirely without a floor, and the series is careful about why. Kilgrave is not written as a supervillain with a scheme. He is written as a man who has never in his life heard the word no and does not accept that it means anything, and every scene with him is about consent. It is the reason the first season of Jessica Jones is still the high point of this whole run.

Minor spoiler

Jessica kills him at the end of the first season. He returns afterwards only as a hallucination, which is the honest version of what happens to a person after somebody like him: the man is gone and the voice is not.

Played by
David Tennant
Role
None. He has never had to have one.
Affiliation
Himself
What they can do
Mind control, carried by an airborne virus. Anyone who hears him obeys.

The journey

What happens to this person, title by title.

  1. Jessica Jones2015

    Comes back into Jessica's life without warning, because he has never once been told no and had it stick.

  2. Jessica Jones2018

    A guest appearance, in the place he never actually leaves.

  3. Jessica Jones2019

    Still in her head, still talking.

Appears in

  1. Jessica Jones2015
  2. Jessica Jones2018
  3. Jessica Jones2019

Sources

Facts last checked on Sep 10, 2026