THE AVENGERS’ INNER CIRCLE BOUND BY EVIL IN THE MIDST
Hang out with Marvel’s mightiest superheroes on the set of ‘Age of Ultron’
BSURREY, ENGLAND eing Earth’s mightiest heroes is a sloppy business, which is the main reason for the huge mess inside Avengers Tower. Housed in a large soundstage at Shepperton Studios near London, the spacious, high-end New York headquarters of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and his powerful crew in the Marvel Studios sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron (in theaters May 1) is like a super man cave: A couch-filled hangout area is surrounded by a library, a full drum set, a Yamaha grand piano and a bar filled with spirits.
But broken glass and dust are everywhere. An after-party for a successful mission goes very wrong when the Avengers are attacked by Ultron (voiced by James Spader), an antagonistic artificial intelligence in an imposing metal body. Ultron was created by Stark and his genius buddy
Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), aka the Hulk, but its peacekeeping programming has backfired, and it has turned itself into a machine bent on global destruction.
Saving the world from certain doom, mechanical or otherwise, is pretty much a regular Tuesday for the Avengers — The Beatles of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The supergroup brings together comic-book heroes Iron Man (Downey), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans) and Hulk from their own solo movies and aligns them with skilled agents such as Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner).
The new sequel brings debut cast members — witchy Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her super-speedy bro Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a different take on the character seen in last year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past — and changes team dynamics and interpersonal dramas.
On the set this day last June, things are heating up in the souped-up science lab. Stark and Banner work on jump-starting a last-resort scenario to take down Ultron but face an unlikely foe in Captain America, teaming with the Maximoffs. Thankfully, Thor makes a grand entrance — via lightning, no less — to keep them all from dismantling each other.
In between takes, director Joss Whedon hurries around fighting filmmaking fires, Olsen stretches out, and Ruffalo pretty much sums up the Avengers’ feelings at the moment: “Whatever happened to us drinking margaritas on the beach?”
Things were less crazy with the alien invasion on New York City in the first Avengers movie, a blockbuster behemoth that made $1.5 billion worldwide in 2012. Besides killer robots, Ultron has become an international affair as our heroes travel from fictional Eastern European Sokovia to South Africa to South Korea.
The heroes take the law into their own hands, but they’re “this motley group of oddballs who all just started getting along five minutes ago. Ish,” says Downey, clad in a DJ Bruce Lee T-shirt and wearing special-effects tracking markers on his right arm where an Iron Man gauntlet will be added in post-production.
Saving humanity isn’t as easy as telling Hulk to smash a building, notes Whedon. “Their relationship to the world is complicated,” he says. “In some ways it’s like America in foreign policy: In some places we’re beloved liberators, and some it’s like, ‘Get out of our city.’ Heroes make us feel better about ourselves, but they also make us feel smaller. And believe me, I’ve spent enough time around Chris Hemsworth to say with deadly accuracy that is the case.”
In Ultron, Hemsworth appreciates having a villain who isn’t bad just for the sake of being bad. “This round, what we’re fighting has been orchestrated from, if you trail it back, each of our actions in one way or another. Even if we’re criticizing one another for why this is happening, we’re involved and we’re all responsible.”
Also a joy for the Australian actor: The sequel ups the action and the humor of the first Avengers.
When Hemsworth walked on set for the party scene where his Asgardian thunder god trades in his armor for something more dress casual, “I said, ‘When the hell did Thor go shopping? I want to see the scene where Thor’s trying on this jacket.’ ”
Age of Ultron gives the actors new chances to branch out with their characters. Considering Banner’s strong, possibly romantic feelings for Black Widow, his (and Hulk’s) story “is more varied and more nuanced than the last time,” Ruffalo says. He also is finding new ways into playing the Hulk, with advances in motioncapture technology.
“He’s a whole enigma to me, this whole mystery that I’m really working my way into and excited about,” Ruffalo says.
Renner’s secret-agent archer Hawkeye spent much of the first Avengers film mind-controlled and away from the rest of the team. He gets some secrets of his own, great lines and a boosted role in Ultron, though he just says he loves playing a normal guy amid peers with mystical hammers and Iron Man suits.
“I get that. I could never do what Hemsworth does,” Renner says. “There’s an everyman human quality to Hawkeye, even though he’s a total badass you wouldn’t want to screw with.”
However, Renner figures the whole Avengers team is “a nightmare for Joss. It’s like wrangling fourth-grade ADD kids without Ritalin — it’s full chaos when you get all of us in a room together.”
We catch Whedon on a good day — after finishing a scene, the fedora-clad filmmaker does a little dance like no one (except a reporter) is watching. That on-set confidence “breeds an allegiance,” Evans says. “What Joss says goes, and I just trust the guy.”
It’s important not “to lose the mission” in capturing the same team camaraderie and huge action scenes from Whedon’s first Avengers, yet the pressure he feels isn’t from meeting box office or studio expectations.
“I have a contract with my audience — that I will do better, that I will give them a reason to come in again that is more than the reason we gave them last time,” Whedon says.
“I had that contract with every episode of television I produced, and when I didn’t come through, I still feel it,” adds the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. “And this is on a much bigger scale.”
Because Thor, Captain American and Iron Man’s solo movies have been such big hits, Downey says, “there’s something about coming into the Ultron of it all where we’re unifying the title — except no one is really wearing all the belts.”
What put the Avengers phenomenon into perspective for executive producer Jeremy Latcham was when a little boy visited the English set of Ultron with Iron Man, Cap and Thor costume changes in tow.
The new film may be a little more mature and slightly edgier, “but you don’t want to make it dark,” Latcham says. “You don’t want to turn that kid off because that kid had the best time ever” at the first film. “That’s the one that keeps you up at night.”
In the epic scheme of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Age of Ultron puts the finishing touches on “Phase 2.” It continues the mythology of the six Infinity Stones, a bunch of cosmically powerful rocks that connect the Marvel films, and sow seeds of discontent among its heroes.
About that scene with Stark aiming his Iron Man gauntlet blaster and Cap beating him to the punch with his shield, Downey says, “that’s an interesting point of entry for any day of shooting. You go, ‘Well, what is that about?’ ”
Audiences will get that answer next year. Captain America: Civil War begins filming this week and will pit Downey’s Stark and Evans’ Cap against each other, on different ideological sides of the debate over superheroes and their role in saving the world.
And sure, for Downey, being a good guy also means tackling evil technological antagonists unleashed on mankind. But by the looks of his wide smile, the actor, 50, wants to stick around as Iron Man for much of the long haul. In fact, he may be looking forward to the two-part Avengers: Infinity War event in 2018 and 2019 more than his fan base.
“Good luck getting me to retire my jersey,” he says, laughing. “I’ll be like Jordan playing at 60.”
“It’s like wrangling fourth-grade ADD kids without Ritalin — it’s full chaos when you get all of us in a room together.” Jeremy Renner