This afternoon, TV critics were given what was for many their first look at ABC’s top-secret Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot which is set in the Marvel Universe and directed by The Avengers’ Joss Whedon. Later, cast and producers participated in a Q&A session talking mostly about the return of Phil Coulson, Clark Gregg’s character who appeared to die in The Avengers movie. In attendance were Whedon, Clark Gregg, Ming-Na Wen (Agent Melinda May), Brett Dalton (Agent Grant Ward), Chloe Bennet (Skye), Iain De Caestecker (Leo Fitz), Elizabeth Henstridge (Jemma Simmons), and Executive Producers Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Jeffrey Bell, and Jeph Loeb.
Right off the bat, the panel assured that Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. will feature as much of the Marvel Universe as they could possibly be allowed. “We’re still working that out. It’s a fluid process,” Joss Whedon says. “The important thing is it’s a fun opportunity, but it’s not the reason behind the show. We don’t want just to be an Easter egg farm. We want people to come back because of these people (pointing to the cast) and not because of some connection to the movie universe. This show has to work for people who aren’t going to see those movies and haven’t seen them before,” he says, although one of the biggest draws of the series is Agent Phil Coulson. When a reporter asked if it’s possible that Coulson is or was an L.M.D. (Life Model Decoy), Clark Gregg simply grinned. Jeph Loeb deflected the question as a “Level 7 question” that cannot be declassified, and Whedon assured that Coulson’s survival will be a part of the story thread.
Whedon also spoke of the trust and freedom the producers have gotten interactions with ABC and Marvel. “We’ve gotten trust, which is different than freedom,” Whedon says. “My collaboration with the Marvel on the movie was pretty extraordinary and, for me, unprecedented. It wasn’t a question of them getting out of the way. We really worked that story together. ABC and Marvel have been very active in making sure the show is what they want for their company and their network and their audiences and, at the same time, very supportive of the vision that we first laid out to them. The most important thing is that we all sort of are trying to make the same show. It’s not really about ‘Oh, we’re past them, and we don’t want have to deal with them.’ We’re all on the same page, which has occasionally not happened to me,” he says.
Beyond the pilot, Whedon hopes to be involved with Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. “as much as an executive producer can who is also making a movie” can be. “I got the best writers I know to do this and actors who can do pretty much anything so that I could do less. That’s always the way to run a show,” he says.
Attention soon turned to Clark Gregg, who recalls how his next-to-last day on The Avengers involved Coulson getting impaled by “this certain Asgardian fellow.” “While I was surprised how emotional it was to me to give up the character and the long‑term job, I made jokes like, ‘Is there a rewrite going to be coming from the governor at any point? Do you want to shoot one where he grazes me a little bit?’ And there was a few kind of, like, pathetic, like, ‘Oh, sad. No’,” he admits. “And it was really clear that I was dead, you know.”
“I’d had a great run, and I thought what Joss did with the character was such a magnificent kind of resolve of it. And I loved what happened in The Avengers,” he recalls, before something else happened. “Somebody sent me a tweet saying that they heard that Coulson’s funeral was going to be in Thor 2, and I was messed up again. I thought it was cool, but I was messed up. I sent an email to Kevin Feige, just saying, ‘I have to do business with this, don’t I?’ Because they’d said a couple of jokes, like, ‘Hey, it’s a comic book universe. How dead can you be?’ But then I thought, ‘I’m pretty sure the Asgardians do that thing where they burn a guy on top of the thing, you know.”‘ I didn’t think I was going to be coming back from that. And then Kevin didn’t respond, and a couple weeks later ‑‑ and this is probably four or five months after The Avengers ‑‑ I got a call from Joss, and we talked about how much we wanted to have whatever reason Coulson had for still being alive and walking around not be anything that undermines the reality of The Avengers. And when he explained to me a little bit more than what you saw in the pilot about the stuff that Coulson doesn’t know, I was ‑‑ I hung up the phone, very deeply on board,” Gregg remembers.
“There was never going to be a show which was called Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. without Clark,” Jeph Loeb says. “That’s the way it started. The first conversations that Joss and I had about it was ‘Okay, we know we want Clark. How do we start there and then move out?’ And then Jed and Maurissa and Joss came up with all these wonderful characters that are aboard the bus and will take us each week to a brand‑new epic adventure.”
“I feel like they put together an amazing team with a really interesting idea,” Clark Gregg says. “I’m completely compelled by the idea of a world post‑Avengers where things are out of control, and humans are once again either eager to get a hold of or already in possession of things we aren’t really socially evolved to the point of dealing with. I feel like that’s a great idea. The fact that every day we show up and our relationship as actors is kind of evolving and mirroring this, I just like what I’m seeing with what we are doing.”
“He’s a magnificent chain letter that began in Iron Man with a couple of scenes that my neighbor, Jon Favreau, asked me to do,” Gregg remembers. “And the minute I showed up and started getting snarky with Robert Downey and improvising a little bit, suddenly, there were more scenes, and he was in more movies. And every new director and writer came and put a little bit more of a twist on him. And at a certain point, he really ‑‑ in Iron Man 2 I saw the other day, he really, kind of, reveals that he’s not quite ‑‑ he’s not afraid of Tony Stark, and he’s going to taze him and watch Supernanny while he drools into the rug. And he became like the guy in Lollapalooza who is in the green room, managing all of these diva rock stars, and I really enjoyed that iteration. Then Joss came around and, kind of, picked up everything else about him, that he’s a geek. He’s a fanboy. He’s the nerd avatar in this world who grew up reading this stuff and absolutely believes in the heroic stuff, which is such a complex dynamic with the guy who also is almost bored with this stuff.”
“I feel very, very fortunate,” Gregg says, and to kind of have him expanded now in this format and to have him interact with this amazing young cast of actors is really a great thing.”
Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. premieres Tuesday, September 24 on ABC. Check out some images from the TCA panel session below, and be sure to visit our S.H.I.E.L.D. portal, SHIELDsite.net, for more on the show!
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2013 TCA SUMMER PRESS TOUR - "Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Session - Jeffrey Bell (executive producer), Maurissa Tancharoen (executive producer), Jed Whedon (executive producer), Jeph Loeb (executive producer), Joss Whedon (executive producer) at Disney | ABC Television Group's Summer Press Tour. (ABC/Todd Wawrychuk)
