A Marvelous Skrull session
It’s not surprising that, when you put Samuel L. Jackson, Emilia Clarke, Olivia Colman, Ben Mendelsohn, Don Cheadle, Cobie Smulders and Kingsley Ben-Adir onscreen together, they electrify. Sit them down for a Marvel presscon though, and they tend to mostly crack each other up a lot.
Launching the Disney+ six-part MCU series Secret Invasion, they were gathered to explain how doing a Marvel project is the “shiznit,” how F-bombs crept into the MCU, what kind of home kitchen space Nick Fury might have, and, importantly, how Skrulls and Earthlings must learn to get along to save the planet.
Or, put another way: if you want to launch MCU’s Phase Five, you’ve gotta bust a few Skrulls.
Take Jackson and Colman, who plays MI6 agent Sonya Falsworth. She looks like a kindly British auntie who will one second be pouring you a cuppa, and the next serving up a lethal injection. She and Sam are old colleagues, but there’s a tense dynamic there — something Jackson dismisses outright. “There’s no tension. The love scene is still in there!” he jokes. “We broke the ice, the first explicit love scene ever in the Marvel Universe. We kill it!” Colman demurely cracks, “I’m not sure it made the final edit.” Her character is on the same path as Fury, trying to find out which Skrulls have been “radicalized” to stir up trouble amongst already paranoid humans. “They’ve got history,” she says of the Nick/Sonya tandem. “They trust each other. Or maybe they don’t.”
Spoken like sworn MCU secret keepers.
Jackson points out that Smulders won his admiration during her first audition playing S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill: “The audition was straight-up technobabble. And she nailed it!”
“And I haven’t gotten it right since,” jokes Smulders.
There was the cute dynamic between Mendelsohn, the green-faced Talos introduced in Captain Marvel, and Clarke, who plays his Skrull daughter in the series, G’iah. “We just had a giggle on set, didn’t we?” she laughs. “It was gorgeous working with Ben.”
“Well, I was very intimidated,” says Mendelsohn. “I watched that GOT thing four times, so I was nervous, right? I didn’t know what to expect. And she was making us meals…”
“The more you find out about Nick, the more you’re gonna like him. It’s just peeling the onion and having a good time. We get new information; we maybe go to Nick’s house. You don’t know if it’s a condo — you’ve got to watch to find out if I live in a condo or a real house. See if I have a yard, that kind of stuff. What kind of furniture does Nick Fury have? Does he have an island in his kitchen? Can he cook? ‘Cooking with Fury,’ yeah.”
The Aussie actor goes on to gush, “Nothing comes close to Marvel. Working for Marvel is the shiznit.”
Fury — er, Jackson — opens up about where his character is at in Secret Invasion. “He’s kind of been gone for a while. He’s a little tired, got a bad knee now, a little vulnerable, but coming back to Earth because he’s been summoned. And we’ll see what happens.”
Fury is back home from the S.A.B.E.R. space station, still mentally recovering from “the blip,” wearing a woolly jacket and shaggy beard more suitable to a transient person. He’s clearly not the Nick Fury of peak Avengers levels.
Yet he’s still Nick Fury, and he’s central to this spy-driven tale about Skrulls and humans trying to coexist.
“The more you find out about Nick, the more you’re gonna like him,” Jackson says of the first MCU project focused around him: “It’s just peeling the onion and having a good time. We get new information; we maybe go to Nick’s house. You don’t know if it’s a condo — you’ve got to watch to find out if I live in a condo or a real house. See if I have a yard, that kind of stuff. What kind of furniture does Nick Fury have? Does he have an island in his kitchen? Can he cook? ‘Cooking with Fury,’ yeah.”
“I think it’s a very human show,” says executive producer Jonathan Schwartz, who came to Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige with the idea to shoot the 2008 comic book series. “It’s the Nick Fury story. And he’s human. He does have his own version of superpowers, but they’re not like superhero superpowers. And it’s a story about him putting his feet back on the ground.”
“It’s different from people flying through the air,” notes director Ali Selim. “We tried to delve into very simple human emotions like trust, and suspicion.”
Yes: Secret Invasion does focus on what is truth and what is fiction, at a time when the world is rapidly being consumed by AI fakes. It also touches on relevant messages of immigration, domestic terror, radicalization and war. You know: reality. But it never forgets that it’s Marvel entertainment.
Jackson is asked about being the first to drop an “F-bomb” into the MCU. He brushes it off, saying that was “something in-house,” not in the final cut. (Though he did almost drop one as he was “flaking off,” as he puts it, during the post-credits sequence of Avengers: Infinity War.) “He says it a lot on the set,” Cheadle puts in helpfully.
With such a heavyweight cast, it’s not surprising that Marvel was seeking a grittier, more down-to-earth story. Feige mentions classic espionage thrillers like The Third Man and The Conversation, and even the darker-toned Avengers: The Winter Soldier as inspiration: full of paranoia and people looking over their shoulders. “I felt that the Skrulls could be used as a metaphor for the current state of the world,” adds Schwartz, “and the spread of disinformation and lack of trust.”
But let us not forget: it’s mostly about these actors enjoying themselves on the set.
Asked if it was hard to dial down his intensity after playing ruthless Skrull Gravik, British actor Ben-Adir shrugged: “Nah, I’m just gonna have a cup of tea, yeah.”
“I come to work to have a good time,” echoes Jackson, wearing a casual peach-colored suit and pants over a black T-shirt. “You know, making movies for me is like my playground. It’s like, I get up in the morning, I eat breakfast, I go out, look for my friends. ‘What are we playing today?’ We start playing and we have a good time doing it. And that’s what I expect to happen. I want everybody to have as much fun as I’m having telling a story or getting into the story.”
Or, to quote a certain Skrull at the presscon: “It’s the shiznit.”
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Secret Invasion premieres on Disney+ June 21.