Clark Gregg Interview: Agents of SHIELD Season 2, Marvel and more!

As we’ve surely complained in the past, it’s difficult to get anything meaningful out of the folks involved with Marvel Studios, so it’s fitting that the top secret agent on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, Clark Gregg, would be close-mouthed about the future of the show. Fortunately, he’s a friendly, fun, relaxed interview, and he clearly understands the heavy fan expectations on his shoulders.

I was lucky enough to get a few minutes with Mr. Gregg with a few other journalists in a packed press room for Agents of SHIELD season 2 and Agent Carter. After a spirited, “Start talking, they’re going to pull me so fast!” We jumped right in to try and get the goods on Agents of SHIELD season two. I don’t know if we actually succeeded, but it was a fun chat nevertheless.

Do you get involved with any of the fan speculation that has been put on the show, and on Coulson in particular?

I read a lot of them, because the creators of the show don’t tell me very much. I usually know about as much as Coulson knows. But Coulson often doesn’t know a lot of the really juicy stuff. I definitely have seen some interesting theories online about who Skye’s dad might be. I do get to find out a little bit before you. It’s badass that Lucy Lawless is gonna get to be a new Agent on our show. 

But he was just made the director of SHIELD right when SHIELD had been burnt to the ground. So it’s the greatest thing that could ever happen to him in the worst possible way. It seems like that’s going to involve him going back into the shadows. This is a guy who has gotten uncomfortable telling secrets, when so many were being kept from him. I think that has to shift, and we’re going to see more of what he has to do and some of the hard decisions he has to make, the kind that Nick Fury had to do in the past. That’s going to create some difficult dynamics between him and his old team.

What about the dynamic between Coulson and May? They’re always looking out for each other…

It’s really true. They really deeply have each other’s backs. They’re kind of old war buddies. It’s just annoying how much pesky sexual chemistry they also seem to have from time to time. I think she’s his best friend in a lot of ways, and he was really heartbroken to find out that she had a private line to Nick Fury and was keeping secrets from him. It kind of hurt to find out that she was there on the Bus to put two in the back of his head if he started turning blue and acting like an alien.

Is it difficult working in the confined of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the show has to operate alongside the movies?

To me, that’s part of the fun of it, they aren’t treating it like separate universes. What happened in Captain America: The Winter Soldier tore our show apart. They did a screening for us a couple of weeks before it opened and we walked out of there with our jaws down to here. All of a sudden we were “agents of nothing.” It’s also cool to know that what happens on our show reverberates back into our universe. To hear that a character from the comics like Mockingbird is heading our way, it’s exciting.

Will the Avengers learn about Phil Coulson’s fate any time soon?

It’s one of the secrets I think Coulson is most eager to tell. I think he feels bad about that and wants to explain it. I think it has to happen. The thing about Marvel is, I don’t know if it will happen in a comic, on our show, on Agent Carter, maybe in Daredevil, or Avengers 3. I dunno. It’s a day of reckoning that’s going to come, though.

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