Wil Traval has spent two decades bouncing between procedurals, superhero shows, and whatever Australian drama needed a brooding face.
Then this month, a show he shot years ago quietly climbed into Netflix's U.S. top ten, and a whole new audience discovered him at once.
The project is *Jessica Jones*, the Marvel series that ran on Netflix from 2015 to 2019.
Traval played Will Simpson, the NYPD sergeant who starts as a love interest for Trish Walker and ends the season as a superpowered, pill-popping wild card.
New viewers are calling him the show's most tragic character.
Old viewers are calling him the reason they still quote "Simpson, you idiot" at their group chats.
Netflix has been licensing its old Marvel catalog back into rotation, and *Jessica Jones* has been charting alongside *Daredevil* and *The Punisher* in the streamer's daily rankings.
For a show that wrapped six years ago, that's a strange second life, and Traval is the unlikely face of it.
What makes it work is that Simpson never fit neatly into hero or villain.
He genuinely wants to do good, then takes a combat drug that rewires him, then loses the plot entirely.
It's the kind of arc that plays differently in 2025 than it did in 2015, when audiences were still arguing about whether Marvel TV counted as canon.
Traval himself has been mostly off-grid on social media, which has only fed the mystique.
His recent credits lean toward Australian productions and guest spots, with no Marvel return on the books.
Fans have spent the past week photoshopping him into *Daredevil: Born Again* threads anyway, because that's what fans do.
Here's the part that actually matters for his career.
Streaming algorithms don't care about release dates, only watch time.
When a decade-old supporting role suddenly outperforms new releases, casting directors notice.
Traval is 54, which in Hollywood terms means he's entering the exact age range where every prestige crime drama needs a weary authority figure with a complicated past.
Simpson's whole arc is about a man who can't stop being useful to the wrong people.
Traval, by contrast, seems content to let the work speak and skip the press cycle.
In an era where every actor launches a podcast the second they book a franchise, that restraint reads as almost radical.
The question fans keep circling back to isn't whether he'll return to Marvel.
It's whether the next showrunner smart enough to cast him will finally give him the lead instead of the guy standing behind it.
He's been the most interesting person in the room for years.
Our take: Traval is the rare case of a streaming revival that actually deserves the attention.
He built a genuinely unsettling character out of a script that could have been forgettable, and the algorithm simply rewarded it late.
Final Thoughts
If Hollywood doesn't hand him something bigger off the back of this, that's on Hollywood.