Occasionally, people will (wrongly) insist that Marvel’s comics, and the movie stories they inspire, would be better off if they were somehow devoid of political themes or ideas. But in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Secret Invasion executive producer Jonathan Schwartz compared the series to John le Carré’s classic Cold War-era spy thrillers and pointed to more recent shows like FX’s The Americans and Showtime’s Homeland as sources of inspiration .
“We often see Nick Fury doing the right thing,” Schwartz said. “We don’t always see him doing it in a perfectly moral way. All of these things have consequences. Without getting too specific, the things Nick Fury had to do to protect Earth come at a price.”
Set some time after Avengers: Endgame, Secret Invasion tells the story of how Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) finally comes out of hiding to deal with a long-simmering problem involving the shapeshifting Skrull refugees, who were first introduced in 2019’s Captain Marvel. When we last saw the Skrulls in Spider-Man: Far From Home, many of them, like Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), were still willingly living as humans and working as secret agents for Fury while he worked to find them a suitable new homeworld somewhere to be found in space. According to Jackson, Fury’s inability to keep his word is a big part of what sets Secret Invasion in motion, and the series will focus on what happens when some of the aliens decide to take matters into their own hands.
“Nick had a whole Skrull spy network because they could change and go places humans couldn’t go,” Jackson said. “They kept their word. You worked for him, but he didn’t do what he promised. They want a home. you want to live They want to live as they are. They want to live in their own skin. They don’t want to live in ours.”
Jackson said the discomfort of not knowing “who’s friend and who’s foe” is what animates Secret Invasion and described the show as tapping into our own current political moment, asking, “What happens when people are afraid and don’t understand others? People?”
Obviously, Fury will have more than enough reason not to join Secret Invasion’s main antagonist, Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir), the Skrull separatist who leads the charge in infiltrating world governments by posing as ordinary people trust. But the story likely gets a lot more complicated when it comes to Gravik’s fellow Separatist, G’iah (Emilia Clarke), who also happens to be Talos’ estranged daughter.
“There’s a certain punk feel to this girl,” Clarke said. “She’s a refugee child whose father was Talos, you know what I mean? Maybe the fact that we didn’t know he had a child up until this point tells you everything you need to know about their relationship.”
In the past, Marvel’s reluctance to really spend time delving into the ramifications of things like ousting the Skrulls in Captain Marvel has made the films’ attempts at political commentary feel pretty shallow, huh maybe the point was. But Secret Invasion seems keen to both pick up on those threads and really pull at them with some intent, and that might be just what it takes to make the series land with some weight if they do premieres on June 21.