‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ delivers Marvel-ous action
Several movie blockbusters of recent years, hailing from a longiconic comic brand, surely haven’t hurt in preselling one of the new season’s most anticipated series.
“Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” bursts into action Tuesday, Sept. 24, on ABC with a combination of intrigue and special effects likely to satisfy anyone thinking even in passing about getting on board. Executive producers including Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly”) and his brother Jed make the intrigue immediate by including Agent Phil Coulson, since Clark Gregg reprises the character who supposedly met his doom on theater screens last year in “Marvel’s The Avengers.”
“It’s been kind of crazy,” Gregg reflects of the ride he’s also had through the films “Iron Man,” “Iron Man 2” and “Thor.” “I’ve gotta say, as a 51-year-old character actor who’s friends with a lot of other character actors, it’s kind of unparalleled. You get a certain number of shots, and you try to hit the ball hard. I’ve been doing this for a while, so to have so much fun stuff start to happen has really been exciting.”
The situation is particularly gratifying for Gregg, whose Coulson leads a specially skilled team fighting bizarre criminals globally, since he “grew up loving comics and sci-fi, discussing them as things that still seem to be about something and can be funny in the way Joss Whedon does them. And to get the chance to work with Joss, I really feel very fortunate.”
Another face familiar to the Marvel faithful turns up in the “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” premiere — but for the benefit of those still unaware, no further spoilers here. Series co-stars new to the Marvel universe include Ming-Na Wen (“ER”) as martial-arts-trained pilot Melinda May, Brett Dalton as espionage veteran Grant Ward, Elizabeth Henstridge as biochemical expert Jemma Simmons, Iain De Caestecker as engineer Leo Fitz and Chloe Bennet (“Nashville”) as computer hacker Skye.
Whedon also wrote and directed “Marvel’s The Avengers” and will direct its “Age of Ultron” sequel. “The thing that appealed to me from the very beginning about the show,” he says, “is the idea of the people who don’t have the superpowers, who didn’t get the hammer, who didn’t get the supersoldier serum. (It’s) the idea that everybody matters, that the people that get shunned to the side in a giant epic that’s only on the screen for two hours can take the spotlight ... the underdog, the common man.
“Clark was that sort of an audience proxy in the movies, and the TV show is very much (like that). I think you can see that from the pilot, very much that sense of ‘Well, what about the rest of us? How do we cope with this?’ It was important that our core team, while they are extraordinary, (is made for) television. They are all incredibly good at what they do and ridiculously attractive. They still don’t fall under the category of ‘super.’ ”
Jeph Loeb — the writer-producer (“Smallville,” “Heroes”) who now oversees Marvel Entertainment’s home screen efforts — explains that for a “S.H.I.E.L.D.” series, “We wanted to do something that would appeal to our fan base, but by the same token, we wanted something (similar to how) Joss just hit it out of the park with ‘Marvel’s The Avengers.’ That’s not a movie for one particular group of people; that’s a movie for everybody.”