Emilia Clarke says it's easier keeping spoilers for Marvel's Secret Invasion than Game of Thrones
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Fire cannot kill a dragon, but spoilers can definitely ruin a good show.
And while Game of Thrones alum Emilia Clarke has a lot of experience dealing with leaked spoilers from that famous TV gig, she reveals that joining Marvel's dark spy series Secret Invasion (premiering Wednesday on Disney+) actually made the whole issue a lot simpler.
"I'll tell you what, it's so much easier now because whenever it comes up or people want to ask, you just get to be like, 'Dude, Marvel. I can't say anything,'" she says in the latest installment of EW's Around the Table series. "That's just what I kept saying over and over again."
In fact, Clarke reveals that Marvel's intense security measures to prevent leaks had an impact on her long before she even joined the MCU. "When we were doing Game of Thrones, when it started to get to the later seasons, some massive security changes happened," she says. "I was chatting with [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] and they were like, 'Marvel. We're just learning from Marvel. Whatever Marvel's doing, we just want to do that.' So that became, you don't print anything — and then there was like me and Peter Dinklage being like, 'I need it on paper! I can't learn my lines without it being on paper!'"
Des Willie/Marvel Studios Emilia Clarke and Ben Mendelsohn in 'Secret Invasion'
When she joined Secret Invasion as the grown-up version of G'iah, daughter of the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), she had a Zoom meeting with Marvel security that "terrified" her. "I was like, 'I think a man's going to come and kill me if I say anything,'" she recalls, adding that she went so far as to take the SIM card out of her phone for the first few days of filming because she was so afraid of fans tracking her down. It took her a while before she "chilled out," because she'll never forget how much it hurt when Game of Thrones spoilers leaked. "It just sucks," she says, before quickly adding, "Not that I did the spoiling."
Secret Invasion star Samuel L. Jackson — reprising his iconic MCU role as Nick Fury — reveals that, like on Game of Thrones, they also had issues with people flying drones over their sets while filming on location. "They shot one down," Jackson says. "And they followed one back to where the dude was. They found him and, yeah, they got him."
"They didn't just hold up a picture of Mark Ruffalo and Tom Holland and say, 'Don't be like these guys?'" quips Don Cheadle, who's reprising his role as James "Rhodey" Rhodes.
"There are worse examples than that!" Jackson adds. "I remember when we got ready to do Avengers, someone printed out a copy of my Avengers script that had my watermark on it, and put it online for sale. I was shooting in Canada and Marvel came to Canada. It had been printed in the production office… They found out who it was, dude quit, left the country. They set up a fake buy for the script, dude didn't show up. It was crazy."
Des Willie/Marvel Studios Cobie Smulders and Samuel L. Jackson in 'Secret Invasion'
Aside from dealing in spoilers, the cast members — from newcomers like Clarke and Olivia Colman to the MCU vets alike — were all excited to do something different with Secret Invasion. "We keep talking about, as a comp, Winter Soldier," Cheadle says. "[It's] an espionage, spy thriller, and these are the right players for that."
Jackson says that Nick Fury is the show's "connective tissue," as Secret Invasion follows the MCU's hardened spy as he discovers that the shape-shifting Skrulls have secretly infiltrated government organizations over the past 30 years. "I'm the guy that everybody knows," Jackson says. "So when [viewers] come to it, they're coming to it like, 'Oh, we're finally getting the Nick Fury series,' but they're going to be surprised because they're going to find out so much about these other people who they're going to want to know more about."
Clarke teases that fans will also "get to know so much more about Nick Fury" through his relationships to all the other characters, including his longtime colleague Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), his old friend Talos, his former ally Sonya Falsworth (Colman), and the Skrull terrorist Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir).
"I get to be a little bit vicious, which is really fun," Colman says of her ruthless MI6 agent character. "And I did ask in the beginning, can she be funny please? Because I find vicious people to be a bit funny. I just quite liked that idea… I do chop off someone's finger, which I don't think people who have seen my work before will have expected."
While fans may think they know what to expect from Fury's reunion with Hill, the actors warn that it'll be anything but predictable. "Maria Hill is just overwhelmed and frustrated with Fury," Smulders says. "It's an interesting thing to play a scene where she gets to call him out on some stuff. It's very intimidating for her, and it's also intimidating to call out Sam. But she has to level with him in this and point out some things."
"Everybody's got some angst with Fury right now," Jackson adds. "It's like, 'Where've you been? What are you doing?' … Everybody's got this thing with Fury and Fury doesn't understand it, and realizes that he cannot be bailed out by these people that have been bailing him out — including the Skrulls, which we find out that Fury's whole ascendance has been because of the Skrull support that nobody knew about. And he hasn't been able to fulfill his promise but they've done everything for him that made him Nick Fury, so he owes them."
Another dynamic that takes an unexpected turn is that of Fury and Rhodey. While these two characters have presumably been allies since the beginning of the MCU, Secret Invasion will mark the first time they appear in the same scene together, and the actors loved finally getting to explore their relationship on screen.
Marvel Studios Don Cheadle in 'Secret Invasion'
"Like Sam, I had a big chip on my shoulder — we thought we should have been in Wakanda together," Cheadle says. "We thought, 'Really? You're not going to pull us into Wakanda? Perfect opportunity.' But we're very glad to have had the chance to do it in this. I've been wanting to work with Sam for many, many years."
Jackson teases that their first scene together is "juicy" because it doesn't go the way anyone would expect. "I didn't have to think about what was going to happen or how it was going to happen; I knew that Don was in the space, I'm in the space, it's about to be lit," Jackson says. "Strike the match, light the fuse, let us do what we do… We all know that we want to be in that space together and that feeling of us creating together is something we need to do before we leave the planet… We're in the same space in the Marvel universe, and we were questioning the fact of, 'How come the brothers in the Marvel universe never hang out?'"
Jackson then dunks on the new Captain America, Anthony Mackie: "Well, all right, maybe I don't want to hang out with him. But the rest of us are trying to get together!"
"What's cool about this is we're seeing both of these characters in a very different way than we've seen them before," Cheadle adds, teasing a "very fraught scene" between their characters. "These are two new iterations of these men in vulnerable positions… In this moment, we're sort of adversaries. It was just fun."
Watch the video above to see what else the cast and director Ali Selim reveal about Secret Invasion.
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