‘Captain Marvel’: Samuel L. Jackson Says Nick Fury Hasn’t Yet “Grown Into His Cynicism”

Captain Marvel will highlight a less jaded Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who may be left with a reason or two to anticipate the greater threat that eventually emerges in The Avengers.

The Nick Fury of 1995 is “not as jaded about the world yet,” Jackson told ComicBook.com. “He hasn’t grown into his cynicism quite yet.”

While Fury isn’t quite yet the more cynical one-eyed super spy audiences are familiar with from Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the future S.H.I.E.L.D. director does still have one eye turned towards the next fight.

“His job right now, his place in the world is to find out where the next enemy’s coming from. And like most sane human beings with a job like that, you figure the next enemy is some other country or somewhere else,” Jackson said.

“And all of a sudden he discovers something that we speculate about and now we know it’s — well, he knows it’s true — that there other beings in the universe, not just us. The next problem will be convincing everybody else that’s true.”

Fury meets his first superhero when he encounters cosmic adventurer Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), who widens his perspective when he’s brought into the intergalactic conflict unfolding between the warring blue-skinned Kree and the shapeshifting Skrulls.

“The movie is definitely called Captain Marvel. It becomes a two-hander for parts of it. So we sort of wanted to give the audience that kind of young Nick Fury origin story as you put it and it’s all there. Hopefully in a way that compliments Carol’s adventure, too,” explained producer Jonathan Schwartz.

“She sort of gets to be the window to him for this entire, bigger universe. So, he’s a little less of the ‘I know everything there is to know’ Nick Fury that we see in the later movies, and a little bit more, perhaps, open to new ideas.”

Fury’s front row seat to the extraterrestrial threats posed to Earth is expected to fuel his eventual founding of the Avengers Initiative, the project that brought together superheroes like Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) to protect the world from an invading alien threat — put into motion by the Mad Titan Thanos (Josh Brolin) — who sought to acquire the all-powerful Tesseract.

Keep both eyes open: Captain Marvel soars into theaters March 8.