Comic Book Resources has an interview with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. produces Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen while TV Guide interviewed producers Jeff Bell and Jeph Loeb. Marvel.com had an interview with Brett Dalton as well. Here are some highlights.
Comic Book Resources:
For as big as these twists are, they feel like they come from a logical place, and as you said there’s been a plan. How far back have you been planting some of these seeds? There was an episode called “Seeds” a couple of months ago, even. Have you been deliberately putting a lot of hints out there to lead to to this point?
Tancharoen: Yes, we have. And I think it’ll be interesting for the viewer once they see the big reveal to go back and look at places where those seeds have been planted. In episode #10, there’s a nice, private moment that Ward has with Coulson — they’re in Lola, and I think they’re going to see a Centipede soldier’s sister, and they’re just having a conversation, finally, about their personal lives. Coulson brings up that he had someone in his past, a cellist, and that he had dinners at the Richmond, and that’s something that comes up later — that’s a tool that Raina uses to help coerce Coulson to get into the machine in episode #11.
And then in “Seeds,” there’s a really nice moment where Skye is standing at the wall of valor, and we hear Coulson’s voice off-camera saying that the world is full of evil, pain, lies and death — and the camera pans and lands on Ward when he says “lies” and “evil.”
Whedon: Because it’s a big part of the film, we couldn’t really have anybody bad within the organization, we couldn’t paint the organization in a negative light, and we couldn’t say the H-word. The concept of the Clairvoyant, which I think we mentioned for the first time in episode #5, that whole thing was born out of a desire for us to have our big bad be tied to it, without us being able to talk about it. We came up with the concept of someone who appears to have powers that we can be chasing on our own, and then reveal exactly how they’re manipulating things later on. That was sort of our way of…
Tancharoen: Hiding the Hydra bomb.
TV Guide:
How much planning did you have to do with those behind Captain America to make sure this all lined up?
Bell: A. Lot. [Laughs] What’s wonderful is the Marvel movie universe is letting us play in their world. We talked with them at the beginning of what we wanted to do, which Marvel characters we wanted to tie in. They created this universe, so we’ve been talking about it with them the whole time. It was also why we knew from the beginning that what the movie reveals is Hydra is everywhere. If that were true, that meant it had to be true on our crew as well. It was exciting for us that, oh my God, we have a giant secret that we’re keeping all season! But it was also hard that there was a snake in the grass that we had to build in and keep that secret the whole season.
Loeb: How much fun is it to, in the pilot, have Coulson look at Ward and say, “I haven’t seen scores like this since Romanoff [Scarlett Johansson],” and have everyone in the audience go, “Oh, that’s so great. He’s a good spy.” No, what that means is he’s somebody who can work at the same level as somebody who’s done nothing but fool people about her identity from the very beginning. The clues were there, you just didn’t know where to look.
Marvel.com:
Marvel.com: When did you learn that your character was going to go to the dark side?
Brett Dalton: When we were shooting “Yes Men.” It was a Friday night and [we were filming a] kind of brutal fight between May, and I thought, “Wow, there’s quite a few people on set for a Friday night, watching a fight scene.” Usually they don’t do that.
And then afterwards [Executive Producer] Maurissa [Tancharoen], who is clearly the designated mother of the entire set, was like, “Hey, you’re doing such a great job, the writers just wanted to talk to you after when you were done.” And I didn’t really think anything of it, and she was like, “It’s all good, don’t worry about it, but we just wanted a few [minutes] when you wrap.” [Then] I’m thinking the entire time, holy crap, they’re gonna kill me off. I better enjoy this scene then because my days are numbered at this point. And you know I’m on a Joss Whedon show, so from the very beginning I’m not unaware of the fact that my position on the team was not a guarantee.
So there I was, I have not felt that way since middle school probably, being called into the principal’s office. It took me a really long time to get dressed because [of] the whole thing. I remember stalling as much as I could, and I walked in and sat down on the couch and there were all the writers there and I thought, “oh my god.” I was kind of in shock, kind of like, “give it to me doc, tell me the results what do we got here.” Then they proceeded to let me in on what their plan for my character had been all along. I don’t think anyone knew who the Clairvoyant was, so they told me first, “Well, Garrett is the clairvoyant and Garrett is your supervising officer and you trained under him so that makes you also part of Hydra.” And I think I just sat there with my jaw open for the next 20 minutes, and they just did all of the talking because I couldn’t say anything. It was a huge turn. I didn’t see any of that coming, so I was just shock for about the next day. Then it sank in and I started to think wow, what a cool opportunity. Because the Ward I thought I was going to be playing for the next few seasons, the whole thing just changed. Now I think what I was given was just a huge opportunity to play somebody who is more complex, more interesting, more dangerous, scarier in a way that Ward wasn’t. I get to play two different characters in a way.
Sixteen and a half episodes of a guy who is very trustworthy and rolled up his sleeves and did all the heavy lifting and didn’t really question authority. You know, a by-the-book risk assessor, and yet here I am. The last five episodes and I get to play somebody who I really think just has a troubled past. It’s so juicy [and] it’s so much more complex than the character I was before that.
I mean, I think it fulfilled a promise of his past. We got from the very beginning, [when] he’s talking to Coulson about how he has a troubled past and the whole revelation that he doesn’t play well with others. The Berserker episode, we get bits and pieces of this troubled past. This delivers on it in an interesting way that nobody sees coming.
Meanwhile Brett Dalton (Agent Ward) shared this on twitter…
Out of the shadows. Into the light. #HailHydra
— Brett Dalton (@IMBrettDalton) April 9, 2014