[This story contains Secret Invasion spoilers for season 1 episode 4, “Beloved.”] One of Earth’s mightiest heroes isn’t from Earth. In Secret Invasion, spymaster Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the shape-shifter Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) catch wind of the rebel Gravik’s (Kingsley Ben-Adir) Skrull insurgency that has infiltrated all aspects of the planet — even the Avengers. As it turns out, there’s a Skrull mole close to U.S. President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney): his right-hand man and advisor, Colonel James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), a.k.a. the armored Avenger War Machine. The revelation came to light during Wednesday’s “Beloved” episode of Secret Invasion, where it’s confirmed that the Skrull imposter Raava (Nisha Aaliya) replaced Rhodey and conspired with another sleeper agent — Fury’s Skrull wife, Priscilla/Varra (Charlayne Woodard) — to assassinate Fury.
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“It’s fun to fold that in and know that that’swhat’s happening underneath all of these Rhodey scenes,” Cheadle told Marvel.com about the Skrull twist. “Rhodes is not who he appears to be.”
First, Skrull Rhodey told the president that Fury and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) were “effectively AWOL” after the former SHIELD Director left S.A.B.E.R. and returned to Earth. Then Skrhodey fired Fury. And then coerced Varra into a plot to kill her husband.
“It becomes sort of a cat-and-mouse game betweenthe two of them, about what he has on Fury and if he’s going to releaseinformation about Fury,” Cheadle continued. “Fury has to play it theright way while still trying to protect and save the planet.”
The twist comes after the reveal that Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), who appeared in the opening minutes of the first episode, was also replaced by a Skrull.
“We needed to have a character that one would notexpect to be a Skrull,” explained Marvel Studios president and producer Kevin Feige. “Don was on board for this reveal ofplaying and revealing another side of Rhodey and revealing that, yeah,Rhodey has been a Skrull.”
Fege continued: “When we have amazing actors, like Don, that have been with us for somany years, we very much treat them as partners in the creativecollaboration. It was very early days when we pitchedthis concept to Don, and he very much was into it and into being ableto play with different sides of Rhodey that we haven’t seen before.”
That revelation raises the question: how long has Rhodey been a Skrull? Since The Falcon and the Winter Soldier? Avengers: Endgame? Captain America: Civil War? Iron Man 2?!
With two episodes remaining, viewers will “understandexactly how long he’s been a Skrull,” Feige added. “We like the idea offans going back and watching some of the other appearances of Rhodey andrealizing that that wasn’t him.”
New episodes of Marvel’s Secret Invasion premiere Wednesdays on Disney+.
