Marvel Star Cobie Smulders Didn't Know Maria Hill Twist While Filming Spider-Man: Far From Home
A post-credits scene revealed Nick Fury and Maria Hill were Skrulls the whole time.
Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio wasn't the only one pretending to be someone he wasn't in Spider-Man: Far From Home. The 2019 movie was set in the aftermath of Avengers: Endgame and followed the recently-unsnapped Peter Parker (Tom Holland) on a class trip to Europe as he grappled with the death of his mentor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). Former S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Agent Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) recruited Spider-Man to join forces with Quentin Beck (Gyllenhaal), a purported superhero from a different reality, to battle the world-threatening Elementals — which turned out to be fake.
The elemental creatures were high-tech illusions created by Beck, whose convincing cosplay superheroics fooled Fury and Hill. However, a post-credits scene revealed that it was the Skrull shapeshifters Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) and Soren (Sharon Blynn) who had impersonated the pair throughout the movie while the real Fury was in space (setting up the events of Secret Invasion).
It's a twist that Smulders didn't learn until after filming had wrapped.
"I wasn't really me. I didn't know that until the end, until we had finished shooting," Smulders said during a panel at Terrificon 2024. "[Marvel Studios] let me know. They were like, 'Just so you know, we were gonna do this thing.'"
Despite playing a Skrull posing as the real Maria Hill, Smulders added, "They wanted me to play it [normally]. Even if I knew the whole time, I think we still would be playing the reality of the day-to-day."
Screenwriter Chris McKenna, who co-wrote the script with Erik Sommers, revealed back in 2019 that an early version of the movie involved a plot linking the master of illusions to the shape-shifting Skrulls.
"There was a very, very early iteration of the Mysterio story that actually did involve the Skrulls that we kicked to the curb early in the story-writing process," McKenna told Variety. "Because this really became a con artist movie, essentially, we really went along with how many ways can we deceive the audience? How many twists and turns can we have?"
"It seemed like it was an idea that [director] Jon Watts had kicked around early on that we embraced as something people would love to have," McKenna continued. "There's always one final twist, and we would be living up to what we were trying to emulate and celebrate."
