EMILIA CLARKE
IS A REAL MARVEL…
The GOT star is secretly invading our screens.
Iam so excited!” beamed Emilia Clarke on Instagram in late April. “This is something that’s been taking up my entire heart and soul these last two years…” She was announcing the July launch of her comic book MOM: Mother Of Madness, about a single-mum superhero who’s “badass, beautiful, fierce, fabulous”. But some other exciting news dropped at the same time – she’s also set to join the MCU in Secret Invasion.
The plot of the Disney+ original series is fiercely under wraps, though we do know that the action spins off from Captain Marvel and will see Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and Ben Mendelsohn’s Skrull Talos trying to stem a dangerous attack on Earth by a violent faction of the latter’s species. In the 2008 comics, the invasion is a long-term plan – Skrull invaders have used their shapeshifting skills to replace many superheroes across the Marvel Universe over a period of years.
Clarke will join the aforementioned Jackson and Mendelsohn plus Olivia Colman and Kingsley Ben-Adir in the starry cast. She feels like a perfect fit for the MCU having played Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, in Game Of Thrones, Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys and femme fatale Qi’ra in Solo: A Star Wars Story, but her role in Secret Invasion is yet to be confirmed. Might she be Abigail Brand, commander of S.W.O.R.D, the extra-governmental intelligence agency that made its MCU debut in WandaVision? Or Queen Veranke, the architect of the Skrull invasion in the comics? Or Jessica Drew aka SpiderWoman… or maybe Queen Veranke masquerading as Spider-Woman?
All possibilities entice, and whichever one it is – or another one entirely – you can bet that Clarke will be giving it her considerable all to pile on the thrills. “Entertainment is about taking you outside of yourself for a second, which is largely what I think the success of Game Of Thrones was,” she told The Guardian. “Escapism is what lots of people go to art for. So, if we can cherry-pick stories to tell people in a shitty time, I’d like to give them something really good.” This is an Invasion we’re ready for. JG
ETA | TBC / SECRET INVASION WILL STREAM ON DISNEY+.