Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Clark Gregg Thinks They Could Kill Coulson Again

In a new interview at Entertainment Weekly, Clark Gregg suggests that Agent Phil Coulson might not actually know how S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to keep him alive following his traumatic injuries in Marvel's The Avengers, and admits that he'll be flipping to the back pages of his scripts to look out for signs his character is doomed again. "He's back. He's thinks he knows how he's back. We'll have to see," the actor said of his character, who appeared in the Thor and Iron Man movies before apparently dying in The Avengers. As the star of ABC's upcoming series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., though, the actor was acutely concerned about the possibility of diminishing those events that came before. "The Avengers, I just thought there was going to be no way. I'm going to be, you know, scooping up pieces of Loki or handing Captain America a really cool machine gun, and then I'll be gone. And when I saw that they really made him a full-out part of the ensemble, and for me the direction Joss chose to take Agent Coulson was better than anything I could have imagined," Gregg told ComicBook.com in an interview last year. "I thought they were pranking me a little bit because there was so much blood on the set of The Avengers," said Gregg while on the carpet of EW and ABC's party in New York City on Tuesday. "I kept waiting to see, are we going to shoot a version where [Loki] misses? And they didn't, so I was really surprised to get that call and I wanted to make sure it didn't do anything to undermine what we achieved there and when [writer-director Joss Whedon] explained the mystery and how they planned to deal with it, with Agent Coulson being around, I was very sold." That enthusiasm doesn't translate to overconfidence just yet, though; the actor isn't sure he's not still a bit expandable. "I have a feeling if they killed me off again it would be for good so I'm very careful to read the end of the script every time I get one. It's like getting struck by lightning. I kind of hope it hits somebody else first before it comes back to me," Gregg said. "Agent Coulson represents the people who don't have superpowers, the guys who actually can be killed — or at least seem to be and yet come back sometimes … Marvel has such a lock on how to do really incredibly visual affects and stunts that we've got stuff on our show that I just don't think we've seen on TV before."