By now the stories of Marvel Studios’ ongoing mission to protect the secrets of their production are legendary. However, the cast of Secret Invasion are playing some of the most secretive and shady operatives in the Marvel Cinematic Universe right now – and even they are opening up about how ‘crazy’ and ‘terrifying’ Marvel’s security measures really are!
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The stars of Marvel’s Secret Invasion sat down for EW’s ‘Around the Table’ segment, and had plenty to say about how crazy it got keeping the secret of the new Disney+ series actually secret:
Marvel newcomer Emilia Clarke said in no uncertain terms that she was “terrified” after taking on the role of G’iah (the daughter of Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos) because Marvel Studios immediately sat her down for a Zoom call, and dropped a ton of security measures and mandates on her: “I was like, ‘I think a man’s going to come and kill me if I say anything.’” She went so far as to remove the SIM card from her phone to keep any overzealous fans (and presumably paparazzi) from tracking her. It would take her a stretch of time before she “chilled out” and felt reasonably confident about maintaining secrecy.
It’s especially surprising to hear that Clarke was so shaken by the pressure of keeping Marvel secrets – after all, the actress had her big break playing Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones – one of the (if not THE) biggest TV shows of the 2010s. Clarke actually shared how the makers of Game of Thrones took their cues from Marvel when it came to keeping spoilers from leaking and trained the actors accordingly. However, while the intensity of Marvel Studios’ security measures initially shook Clarke a bit, she eventually saw them as a nice bit of press armor:
“I’ll tell you what, it’s so much easier now because whenever it comes up or people want to ask, you just get to be like, ‘Dude, Marvel. I can’t say anything,’” Clarke explains. “That’s just what I kept saying over and over again.”
Samuel L. Jackson actually revealed that Secret Invasion’s set was invaded by drones. Not only did Marvel Studios security take out one drone, but they would also track down the pilots and deal with them too:
“They shot one down,” Jackson says. “And they followed one back to where the dude was. They found him and, yeah, they got him.”
As the man who first ushered Iron Man viewers into the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jackson has seen the evolution of both a media industry obsessed with digging for production spoilers and the new studio tactics to combat those leaks. As Jackson recalls, filming the first Avengers movie is where things really got wild:
“I remember when we got ready to do Avengers, someone printed out a copy of my Avengers script that had my watermark on it, and put it online for sale. I was shooting in Canada and Marvel came to Canada. It had been printed in the production office… They found out who it was, dude quit, left the country. They set up a fake buy for the script, dude didn’t show up. It was crazy.”
So far, the shock from Marvel fans over the major character’s death at the end of Secret Invasion’s premiere episode proves that all that intense secrecy was worth it.
Secret Invasion is streaming on Disney+.
