Q&A: The Avengers’ Clark Gregg on the Rise of Coulson

He’s been called the emotional heart of The Avengers, and Clark Gregg’s Agent Phil Coulson took a long time to get there. Beginning in Iron Man, Coulson has appeared in a number of Marvel superhero movies, his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe growing to a critical mass in this film, where he got to hang out with his childhood hero Captain America and brag about his near-mint collection of vintage Cap trading cards.Actor Clark Gregg joined us for a discussion of the film, and about Coulson’s unexpected and circuitous path to The Avengers.We’ll try to excerpt some audio from this interview to run on a special Avengers edition of the Panel Discussions podcast on Thursday–Gregg was a delight to talk to, as his enthusiasm for the project just poured through the phone and, at times, he sounded like a kid in a candy store.Please keep spoilers out of the comment thread as much as possible. Agent Coulson hates spoilers.I’ll do my best not to spoil anything, so you don’t have to hunt me down.Good! Yeah, I don’t take kindly.You were able to craft Coulson more or less out of whole cloth; you didn’t have the baggage of having a character with decades of history. Was that a weird experience when you were dealing with all these other great actors who were a bit more constrained by the contents of the page than you were?Yeah, definitely at first, becuase he was the only character who wasn’t in the comics, really, and he was more of just a guy who came through with some papers.I was talking to Kevin Feige about that the other night; that’s how I remember it. I said, “He wasn’t ‘Agent Coulson of S.H.I.E.L.D. in the first draft I read,’ and he said, ‘No, he wasn’t at all.’” To Marvel’s great credit–and certainly I’m very grateful for it–they have all of these ideas but they don’t know how they’re going to get there and the look and they see what seems to be working and what tools they can use. And they decided after a day or so that this is the guy. The terrific writers on Iron Man said, “Could this be the guy from S.H.I.E.L.D.?” and pretty soon they started adding more scenes and when it got to the end of it, and it was just Gwyneth and Robert and me in a room and I’m telling him what to say at the press conference, I thought, “this really became something more than I thought!”