‘Secret Invasion’ Finale: Director Ali Selim Talks Tying Up Loose Ends & Choreographing A Super Skrull Fight

Katie Campione
·9 min read
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SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the finale of Marvel’s Secret Invasion.

Marvel’s Secret Invasion wrapped up on Wednesday, though little — if anything — is actually resolved. In fact, it appears that Earth might just be worse off than it was before Nick Fury came back from space to save the day.

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This is your last warning to stop now if you don’t want to be spoiled on the finale of Secret Invasion.

Episode 6, titled “Home,” begins right where the previous episode left off. Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) had given Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) an ultimatum: Bring him The Harvest (aka a vial containing the DNA of every superhero/villain who was at the Battle for Earth in Avengers: Endgame) or he will continue on his quest to start World War III. Gravik has devised a plan to have his spy Raava, who is currently impersonating Rhodey (Don Cheadle), convince President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) to launch a nuclear attack on the Skrull base in Russia. He’ll only stand down if Fury hands over the DNA.

But, Fury has one last trick up his sleeve to try to stop Gravik in his tracks. He’s teamed up with MI6 agent Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman) to rescue President Ritson from the hospital and convince him to stand down while G’iah, impersonating Fury, will go to the Skrull base to confront Gravik. Both end in a standoff.

At New Skrullos Fury/G’iah tries to apologize to Gravik for leaving him and the other Skrulls in the dust after the Blip. But Gravik hates Fury too much to accept any apology, giving an impassioned speech about how the man he’d chosen to impersonate was the first man he killed at the direction of Fury. He tells Fury that all of this death and destruction, and the looming extinction of the human race, is all his fault. Then, he plugs the vial into the reactor and turns it on, infusing himself with all of the powers the DNA held. He thinks it’ll kill Fury, and it would, except this is actually G’iah. Once she reveals herself, he realizes that she also has these otherworldly powers and the pair battle it out. G’iah ends up using Captain Marvel’s powers to smash a fiery hole through Gravik’s stomach, and that’s the end of that.

Back at the hospital, Fury has a hard time convincing President Ritson that Rhodey is being impersonated by a Skrull until he shoots him in the head. Watching Raava’s body shapeshift back into true form is about as convincing as it gets. Except, this actually does little to talk Ritson off the ledge of starting an all out war. Instead, it empowers him to declare war on every alien species residing on Earth. Yep, you heard that right. All of them.

It’s incredibly unclear how all of this is going to play out in future MCU projects, though it seems like, in trying to avoid one war, Fury seems to have indirectly caused another one.

Secret Invasion director Ali Selim spoke with Deadline about what went into crafting the finale, from the emotional standoff between Gravik and Fury (well, G’iah) to the Super Skrull battle, as well as what Marvel storyline he’d like to explore next.

DEADLINE: There was a lot going on in this final episode. What was the most challenging part about tying up this series?

ALI SELIM: I guess a lot does need to be wrapped up. The most important thing is stopping the Skrull invasion, which involves not only Gravik, but also Rhodey. And we didn’t understand that until Episode 4, that we also had to stop Rhodey. So that’s an interesting addition to the threads. I think once you wrap those up — in what I thought was a very creative way, having Emilia Clarke and Sam Jackson join forces to wrap it up — there’s some minor threads of like, now what happens to Sonia and G’iah? But I think the biggest challenge was how many threads there were to wrap up. Wrapping up the big threads was fun, creative, [and] easy, and I think it helped wrap up some of the smaller threads, like bringing Emilia Clarke into that Super Skrull fight wraps up a couple of things at once in a creative way. But a big sprawling story like that is always a challenge to wrap it up in a way that feels resolved and the MCU also feels like it could go on in some way. So I hope we accomplished that.

DEADLINE: When you read the finale, which scene were you most anxious about? Were there any that felt particularly tricky?

SELIM: Those fight scenes, and the explosion in Episode 1 and ambush in Episode 4 — they’re huge, but they’re not that challenging. You work on them for months with an army of storyboard artists, and then you break the storyboards down into stunts, and they break the stunts down in a second unit, and then you bring in visual effects to put on the finishing touches. There’s so much that gets you to the finish line and so many great people running the race with you that it never feels like ‘Oh, this is such a challenge.’ But for me, the challenge is our human emotion and vulnerability, like Sam Jackson and Emilia Clarke in Episode 5 talking about the death of Talos, and being able to find the pathos in those moments. And for me, there’s a big fight in Episode 6, but there’s also this incredibly vulnerable conversation between a broken Gravik and a really broken Fury, who we ultimately learn is G’iah. But when you’re watching it, you are watching two men say ‘I’m sorry,’ which is kind of groundbreaking in a way. I mean, would you ever see Biden and Putin in a room saying, ‘I’m sorry?’ I don’t think so. So it’s those moments that are challenging, to make them truthful and make them feel like they’re part of a bigger warring story. Sam and Kingsley are a couple of incredible actors who really made my job easy.

DEADLINE: I’m glad you mentioned that scene with Gravik and Fury/G’iah. Kingsley is particularly impassioned in that scene. Can you talk more about how you approached it?

SELIM: A lot of prep, mostly. Kingsley and I, before we shot that scene, we talked about that scene for eight months, time and time again. Some of his thoughts reshaped the dialogue, and it would get rewritten, and some of my thoughts reshaped the action, and it would get rewritten. But ultimately, it’s it’s more prep work than shooting. I think it’s interesting to try things on set and no two tapes are ever actually exactly the same. I mean, I hope continuity is the same — reach for the glass at the right time, and things like that — but just the emotion of it is never exactly the same. So yeah, we’re trying different things, but we’re always heading towards the same finish line and just finding maybe a slightly different path along the way. Kingsley is a specific, determined actor who makes really challenging choices and really interesting choices and confrontational choices and harmonious choices. So it was an interesting process with him. But I think ultimately, he really found an interesting, nuanced, and probably deeper, more complicated villain than we’re used to.

DEADLINE: After becoming Super Skrull, Gravik and G’iah are presumably the most powerful beings in the MCU, and we see so many of those powers they absorbed come out in their fight. I assume it was mostly visual effects, but was there any use of practical effects?

SELIM: It’s a show that’s done on a human scale and, for me, the best way to achieve that is actors in an actual practical location. So I pushed for that as often as I could, because I think performance is different when they’re actually touching a door and not pretending to touch a blue screen door. It’s the same with that fight. We storyboarded that fight for months. We revised the storyboards. Stunts helped us revise how it would go, what was possible, what was a constraint. And we shot it mostly on location, but there’s some things that had to be blue screen. But ultimately, I think the decision was made that as little of the Skrull power, as possible, would be practical, because there were constraints about shifting from this power to that power [because it] looks funny. There’s a more elegant way of choreographing it, I think that was just better done in visual effects. And so kudos to Aharon Bourland, the head of the visual effects department, who really made that fight as elegant and beautiful as it ended up being.

DEADLINE: When you have to lean so heavily on VFX, how do you make sure you’re still getting grounded performances from your actors, especially for someone like Kingsley who is in Skrull form?

SELIM: The nice thing about Emilia is her performance is all practical. There’s nothing about her performance that happened in visual effects. Gravik is the monster obviously. He’s drawn. We had endless VFX meetings about performance, about how to make his mouth look more like he was thinking this or he was doing that. Performance is very important to me, because that’s ultimately what my job is. It’s a tricky thing to have a largely visual effects appearing fight that needs to feel driven by human desire and human goals. I worked with Kingsley on set, and I worked with Kingsley’s body doubles on set, to move in the way that communicated what I felt Gravik was feeling, not just what Gravik was doing. Aharon Bourland is great about that. As a visual effects person, she can do performance, and we had great meetings about that. I ultimately think that’s what makes that fight work is that you feel it rather than just see it.

DEADLINE: In terms of the actual logistics of the fight, how did you choose which super powers we would see come out in different moments?

SELIM: It starts with Kevin Feige, who says ‘We’re gonna have a Super Skrull fight and all superpowers are fair game. I think that is actually best communicated in the moment where Gravik takes the vial from Fury and puts it in the computer for analysis. We see oh, it is all the superpowers scrolling up here. Then honestly, it’s a discussion of paper, scissors rock, which superpower from G’iah is going to dominate a superpower from Gravik? Paper, scissors rock, which superpower from Gravik is going to dominate G’iah momentarily? It’s also just a little bit of choreography and visual elegance or beauty, just making it work. There were some transitions from a superpower to another superpower that made sense in story that just didn’t look good. So we shifted the story to accommodate the choreography.

DEADLINE: Now that Secret Invasion is over, at least for the time being, are you open to more Marvel? Are there any MCU characters or stories you’d want to explore?

SELIM: I’m open to returning to Marvel. It was a great experience. I believe it’s the pinnacle of storytelling in the industry today. I have a particular fondness for this Sonya/G’iah partnership, but am I the right person to do it? I don’t know.

All episodes of Secret Invasion are now streaming on Disney+.

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