Anthony Mackie Reveals Marvel’s Script Security Is Because of Samuel L. Jackson

Anthony Mackie reveals Samuel L. Jackson is the reason why Marvel has such tight security for their scripts. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Mackie shared a story about how Jackson’s assistant accidentally printed multiple copies of the original Avengers script. A production assistant found the second copy sitting in the printer and decided it to sell it. Mackie and Sterling K. Brown (who starred in Black Panther) traded anecdotes detailing how Marvel goes to extreme measures to ensure scripts do not leak. Brown had to return his script pages each day after shooting. Mackie’s scripts now get delivered in person to his home in New Orleans.

“Sam Jackson was at work, they send him the first Avengers script. His assistant downloads the script, goes in the office, and presses print on the computer. It doesn’t come out,” Mackie said. “They call the tech. The tech comes, works on the printer. The script comes out, he takes it to Sam. But he had clicked it twice. So a second script came out once he had left. PA on the movie found the script in the printer … and sold it … then the whole script was online.”

Mackie explained how he receives Marvel scripts now. “When I get a script now, literally, a 21-year-old gets on a plane and flies to New Orleans, comes to the door, face-to-face, I have to sign for the script. They take a picture of the script in my hand with my name on it … they fly back to LA that day.”

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Secrecy has become par for the course with any big-budget Hollywood franchise, especially Marvel. So many MCU actors have made jokes about the “Marvel snipers” who will take action if anything about a project is accidentally leaked. The cast of Thunderbolts* told us that keeping secrets is actually the scariest part of making an MCU film.

Of course, Jackson is hardly the only Marvel actor responsible (directly or indirectly) for revealing Marvel spoilers. Some actors, most infamously Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo, have loose lips in interviews and spill details they aren’t supposed to. Simu Liu blamed Holland and Ruffalo’s penchant for spoiling things for why the Avengers: Doomsday cast was kept so heavily under wraps until Marvel’s record-breaking livestream event in late March.

Some might find Marvel’s methods to be a tad extreme, but it’s understandable. Marvel likes to be in control of the information rollout for their projects, revealing key details on their terms. A script circulating online before a movie has even started production obviously throws a monkey wrench in that strategy. This is all in the interest of preserving spoilers so the developments in the films and TV shows land with the desired intent. Not only that, scripts can be in a constant state of flux even when the cameras are rolling. Marvel doesn’t want the public’s perception of projects to be tainted by something that might not even represent the final version. The MCU is full of interconnected characters and stories; one movie can have a domino effect on several others in development, requiring rewrites.

What happened in Jackson’s case was an honest mistake. Everyone’s encountered a technical issue with a printer before; the actor’s assistant probably hit print twice to make sure something was wrong with the printer and it wasn’t just a user error. It’s unfortunate someone else stumbled across that second Avengers copy, but Marvel learned a valuable lesson from that experience and ramped up security measures to ensure something like that didn’t happen again.