‘Captain Marvel’s Jude Law Got Important MCU Advice From Robert Downey Jr.

Captain Marvel continues its first promotional push by debuting the first in-depth interview with Jude Law, regarding the significance of his mysterious role in Captain Marvel, and what kind of place he will hold in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Speaking with EW, Jude Law also revealed some behind-the-scenes information about how he finally got lured into the Marvel Studios machine. As Law tells it, one piece of helpful advice he got came from the godfather of the MCU himself, Robert Downey Jr.!

In Law’s own telling:

“He [RDJ] talked a little bit about how [making a Marvel movie is like] fitting this one piece into a bigger picture that someone else has got their eyes on, and giving yourself over to that. It’s not about trying to understand everything. Just do your piece.”

That sounds like a small piece of advice, but it does have major impact on how a classically-trained actor like Jude Law approaches a concept like acting in a MCU movie. For better or worse, Marvel Studios has indeed changed the way the business of cinema works. Longform cinematic storytelling has been interesting ten-year experiment to watch, and it’s forced some serious revision to how filmmakers produce movies, and also how actors tackle their character performances.

As Downey’s advice hints, actors can’t take on something like a MCU movie with the traditional understanding of performing a complete, standalone, character arc and narrative. With all the moving pieces of the MCU, and all the secrecy that needs to be maintained, actors are routinely brought in to act out scenes, without truly understanding how that scene will fit into the larger narrative of the film – let alone the even larger saga of the MCU. In fact, the massive cast of Avengers: Infinity War and the upcoming Avengers 4 has famously recounted their confusion at trying to film the two Infinity War movies with little understanding of their role in its proceedings. Only actors like Benedict Cumberbatch and Downey had a bird’s eye view of the plot, which meant a lot of performers had to put passion into their small arcs – a trick that Jude Law will have to employ in Captain Marvel.

At the moment, it’s suspected that Law will be playing a version of Mar-Vell, the first Captain Marvel from Marvel Comics. However, his interview also suggests that this MCU adaptation of the character may not be as noble as his comic book counterpart – which could become a very hard lesson for Carol Danvers to learn.

Avengers: Infinity War is now available as a digital download and on Blu-ray and DVD. Ant-Man and the Wasp is now playing in theaters. Upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe movies include Captain Marvel on March 8, 2019; Avengers 4 on May 3, 2019; Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th, 2019. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has been delayed indefinitely.