We recently visited the set of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. With the latest episode, "Inside Man," we're seeing some changes for characters as we move towards the end of the third season.
We spoke to the executive producers, Jeffrey Bell, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon to find out what's coming up. We'll have more interviews with cast members coming. There will be some minor spoilers for season 3, episode 12 "Inside Man."
Question: What did Brett do to piss you guys off to get the weird honey scene?
Jed Whedon: You mean the one where he’s dripping and showing off his perfect body? He was real sad. We did tell him right before Thanksgiving that that scene was…
Maurissa Tancharoen: Have fun eating.
Jeffrey Bell: Any time an actress is going to be in a bathing suit, a guy’s going to take off his shirt, or be covered in goo, you have to give them like a two week notice. So they can go…
Tancharoen: No carbs. No carbs.
Bell: Then they show up because they’re already so far ahead of the rest of us, that two weeks are like perfect.
Tancharoen: He actually did not have a good time. We promised that the goo was going to be slightly warm. And we attempted to warm it.
Bell: I think it was initially.
Tancharoen: It was initially warm.
Bell: Take one.
Tancharoen: After a while, it got a little…
Bell: Cold, dripping goo. There were these great photos online of a photographer who was taking pictures of people covered in honey, and he had really large people and babies. And they were all really fantastic pictures. We thought, this is kind of like a birth. We thought, we should do that for him. And how much fun that would be for him. We didn’t take that into consideration.
Question: Can you guys talk about, whenever Hive sort of talks, he always says we, and he’s also affecting other people. Can you talk about the logistics of how Hive works a little bit? What exactly he is doing to these other people?
Whedon: Well, we can’t totally. Some of that will be revealed.
Bell: That will actually all…that’s all that will be laid out. I think I can say this without spoiling anything. If he was something on the planet that then embodied Will on the planet, and then after Will died, he then embodied Ward, and when he was Will he was able to have memories of Will, there’s a fill-in-the-blank sort of conclusion I think that you can take from that.
Whedon: Without him actually saying it.
Bell: Without me saying it. But I do think we’ve laid out the map of where it’s going.
Tancharoen: Or you just think of the word Hive. What does Hive mean? Hive-minded. Things like that.
Bell: It means bees.
Tancharoen: It means bees.
Question: This is sort of your riff on the Marvel Comics version of Hive. How did you decide this is the best way to show what this character is and sort of turn Ward into a little monster it seems like?
Whedon: Well, I mean, we’re huge fans of Brett.
Bell: You wouldn’t know it from the things we put him through. But it’s true.
Whedon: It is true. This was another way to sort of not only give him a challenge, but to give Ward a new…he’s been the baddie for a while and I thought it was a nice way to escalate this character. As you were just mentioning, there’s still memories in there. So there’s still an aspect of the man we came to love to hate in there, but we wanted to give it some extra juice and we wanted to give Brett one more challenge where he has to change his character.
Tancharoen: Also, I think we’re very interested in seeing how our team will respond, eventually, if they happen to cross paths. How they will respond to seeing the man they all know and hate still standing. And if he does have Ward’s memories or parts of Ward’s personality, how then that will play into scenes with our characters.
Bell: One of the challenges anytime you have an antagonist, what’s the antagonist’s motive? It’s like, I want to rule the world, or it’s I want revenge or I want love or I want greed.
Whedon: Closure.
Bell: Whatever it is. So to be able to embody an antagonist with somebody we already have feelings for, it’s already loaded and interesting to us. So for Ward to then, or for Brett to embody whatever this thing is, puts a face on it that comes super loaded for us. So for us, it’s much richer than Monster X, in the same way that Lash was much more interesting to us once we understood it was Andrew. That to us was, it’s not just the thoughtless monster who’s going around doing this stuff, you have the drama of Andrew, you’ve got his relationship with May, and then suddenly, that whole character became, for us at least, much more intriguing.
Question: You kind of reversed that with Creel in this episode. Bad guy somewhat good now. How long are you going to maintain that? Was this a one-off? Or are we going to see more of him as the series pushes forward?
Whedon: Well, we have a lot of characters now in the hopper. Deathlok is an example of someone we always have on the shelf. I think the Creel sort of fits in that category. One of the things that was interesting about his character in the first season is he was the first, or second season, he was the first indicator of this Whitehall brainwashing thing. So it really wasn’t his fault. There is some debate about that in this episode. We also love his power. We wanted to bring it back just to see that and to do a little bit of the turn of expectations.
Tancharoen: We tend to bring characters back we like, at least once.
Question: You mentioned Deathlok. Will we get to see him again this season?
Tancharoen: He mentioned it. [points to Jed] I don’t know what that means though. It’s always a possibility.
Bell: A behind the curtains peak is there are times when we want to bring people back, and as you know, there are 400,000 shows on TV right now, and sometimes you want a person, and that person’s not available.
Whedon: Because now if they are good, they have their own TV show.
Bell: So we’re still figuring it out at the end of the season, but sometimes there are people we’d like to come back, and we can’t have them because they’re not available.
Tancharoen: Just logistically, it’s a puzzle.
Bell: Like the handful of times we had Patton Oswalt is because he had two minutes in his schedule of doing 30,000 things a week.
Tancharoen: Oh my God. He’s the most employed person we know.
Bell: So it’s not because we don’t love people or because we don’t think the fans would enjoy, or even it’s not because we think, oh this would be a really good story to insert this character, there are real world logistics that in general, we don’t want fans to think about, but that does play into it sometimes.
Question: Coulson, in the last episode, it seems like he was getting back, stepping back toward legitimacy, but this episode seems to throw a significant Malick-shaped monkey wrench.
Bell: It’s a good sentence.
Question: Will that continue to play out? Or is it just kind of, alright business as usual. Back to the nobody knows we exist drawing board?
Whedon: Well, yeah. They’re sort of on the fence now trying to figure that out. I think that part of the Malick-shaped monkey wrench is that once you have the president on your side, it feels like you’re pretty well-stacked. We wanted to make Malick equally dangerous. His international reach and his influences far and wide. So it’s not as easy as getting the secret blessing of the president. He says, my hands are tied. Yours aren’t. He says, your gloves are off. Go nuts. That doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. But he is trying to work towards some sort of…I think that he doesn’t want S.H.I.E.L.D. to be hunted anymore. So he is trying to work towards legitimacy. But it’s not an easy road.
Question: It seems like you guys are setting up, there’s obviously two teams within S.H.I.E.L.D, where you have Daisy and Secret Warriors, we don’t call them Secret Warriors, but…
Bell: Because that would be weird.
Question: Like Coulson and May and Hunter and Bobbi, how difficult has that been? We’ll see them yoyo and come back together. How difficult has it been having almost two separate teams in a way?
Tancharoen: It’s so funny, we’ve been asked that before. I don’t really feel that it’s…it hasn’t felt like we’ve been trying to juggle two separate teams. It does feel like it’s just an extension of a team that we have, it’s just a new…
Whedon: A new dynamic.
Tancharoen: A new dynamic within it. So I don’t know. I don’t think that it’s been…
Whedon: I think it’s more, we’re trying to reflect Daisy’s pursuit of this idea, and her desire to bring people like her together. And that does create complications, as you see in 11. Hunter saying, "Bloody powers…We are different from them. How can we compete?" Everybody who’s human in the field in 11 gets kidnapped because they can’t compete with these. So I think that there is a…it’s creating a dynamic within the team.
Tancharoen: It’s enhanced the perspectives, the varying perspectives that we’ve already established. Namely, Mack and also now Daisy, who is kind of taking on, not necessarily, I wouldn’t use the word militant, but just, she is proud and human. We’re feeling that pride. And it’s also part of her just building her leadership role within the team. Her being the point person of assembling this team. So I think having these new people come into play, it’s more about asserting this new arc that we have for Daisy.
Question: We’re seeing this clash between Daisy and Lincoln in the way they view their powers and the ideology behind it. How direct of an allegory are you trying to make that to struggles that people are facing nowadays and being oppressed?
Bell: I think the beauty of doing a genre show if you can make those kinds of metaphors and allegories. And depending on your particular issue or where you come from, you can read into that a lot. So I’ll say, we’re aware that we’re doing that, but what people put on that is sort of the fun of people interpreting the story.
Whedon: Right, and there’s two aspects to it. There’s the, what it’s like to be different and to be treated different because you’re different, and then as well, we have the debate at the table of, what happens when a weapon’s in the wrong hands? So both those sides of the argument make that, have equal weight. So that makes it fun to write.
Question: We saw Daisy and Lincoln debating the potential antidote or vaccine, connected Creel’s blood. When that kind of spreads to the rest of the team and they find out about it, is there going to be conflict about, okay, we should definitely institute this, and force this on these inhuman? Is that going to create conflict within the team?
Whedon: Well, I think it’s a powerful idea, and whether or not they find something that works is a question. But I think at the center of the show now is sort of this question of, if you could choose it, would you want to? Would you choose to have this happen to you? Is it a choice? Do people who change, how do we treat them? Do they immediately have freedom to be who they want to be? Or is it a very dangerous weapon that we have to control or at least understand? That’s a lot of the stuff that we’ll talk about really moving forward forever because that’s the dynamic between regular humans and empowered, enhanced humans, or Inhumans.
Question: Will you guys bring in any elements from Civil War with the Sokovia Accords and the power of people becoming public knowledge?
Whedon: It will definitely have a ripple effect. I mean, it is one world. So if there’s a giant event, it will definitely have a ripple effect in our world.
Question: Lincoln was starting to struggle with his powers within S.H.I.E.L.D. and his own place in the team. So is he going to continue to struggle going forward?
Bell: Yes, but not in the same way. I mean, there’s an arc to him sort of…because he has a lot going on. He has a power that he’s not sure he wants. He has a power he has trouble controlling. He also has other issues in his past that are amplified by the power. Like, his issues of anger and authority and control. And he likes Daisy, who is in a weird way his boss. So I think all of those things…
Tancharoen: He’s very confused.
Bell: …are a complicated arc for him because we like watching Lincoln wrestle with those, but there has to be movement or we’ll just get tired of him being like…
Tancharoen: I’ve got to say, it’s really fun to watch our actors do the powers without all the VFX. They are still a little bit self conscious of just standing there and going…
Bell: You’ll see them before they’re rolling, they’re standing on the side going [practices power stances]
Tancharoen: Yeah. Yeah.
Question: Have we seen all the darkness…It feels like there’s still something percolating there with Coulson asking Fitz how he feels. The first half of the season we had a lot of, oh there’s something dark about him and I’m just curious, has that been fully explained?
Whedon: It has not.
Tancharoen: It has not.
Bell: But wait, there’s more.
Question: Actually, since you had the pickup for season four, I’m curious, and I was like, yes! Does that impact your writing now that you have that confirmed? Are there seeds that you are like, we’re definitely allowing doing this storyline?
Whedon: Yeah, what we were planning, in our heads there’s always kind of more coming. And you have to plan for, even if it hadn’t happened early, which we very much appreciate. We have to work as though it’s coming, because happens like this. But it does give us confidence in that, and it allows us to sort of, as we’re setting stuff up, do it with a little bit more confidence.
Tancharoen: Pizzazz. Stuff that’s already spinning, we can now actually…
Bell: The only thing that’s really helpful would be if they said okay, this is your last, so you know you’re working towards a series finale. Like, when we did Angel, we knew the series finale was coming up so we worked towards that. But we always have to assume the best that we’re going to go forward and get another season. And you want to write that season finale so that it’s satisfying, whether there’s more or not.
Question: There’s also a chance that Bobbi and Hunter may be following their own path come the fall. So is that something you’re looking at on the story level now? Or will you cross that bridge when you sort of need to?
Bell: Why are you looking at me?
Whedon: They are currently on our show. Our plan is to have them on another show, so we’ll have to address it in the story. Where that happens will be for you to find out.
Question: You kind of set them up on their own journey right now with them heading out in the airplane. Can you tease a little bit?
Bell: Oh you mean in episode 12?
Tancharoen: The airplane crashes.
Whedon: Taking out Malick.
Question: Can you tease a little bit about what’s next, and is this kind of a back door pilot in a sense?
Bell: All I will say is we hope one day they may have their own show. But while they’re on S.H.I.E.L.D., we want to take advantage of who they are, and give the audience as much of their relationship with one another, and with other people, as possible to make that really satisfying. So we are aware that there is a potential immanent end, and so they won’t be neglected. That’s a crappy answer, I’m sorry.
Question: Can you tease the arc in the next episode too?
Whedon: An adventure.
Question: You’re only giving us two words?
Tancharoen: Rip roaring adventure.
Stay tuned for more interviews and more on the set visit.