Marvel Studios and Disney take MCU secrecy seriously. So when Nerdist visited the set of Avengers: Infinity War last summer, ahead of the release of Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther, squeezing answers out of the cast and crew proved to be a tricky endeavor… especially because most of them hadn’t read the completed script.
Unit publicist John M. Pisani told us that maybe five people on the whole production had read the entirety of the screenplay for the third Avengers installment—that’s how intensely the MCU is dedicated to keeping its secrets. Naturally, directors Anthony and Joe Russo are among that exclusive number, as are screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. But when it comes to Avengers: Infinity War‘s stars, not so much.
Asked if we’d see a happier version of the Winter Soldier after his Wakanda sojourn, Sebastian Stan admitted he’d only seen a handful of pages of the script. “I’ll tell you, in the 10 pages that I was allowed to read, I didn’t see that,” he said. “For the other—I don’t know—90 to 100 pages that are in this film that I did not read, I have no idea.”
“We have an outline,” Anthony Mackie made clear in his paired interview with Stan. “We have an overall idea of what the movie is. The Russos come to us and tell us where we are in the movie. You know, for an actor, the most important thing is where you’re coming from and where you’re going, to explain what you’re doing in that scene. So they always give us that information.”
“There’s also trust,” Stan added. “We’ve been with these characters so long, I feel like they trust us. It’s not like you’re showing up to all new material. You come to it with a history, and that’s part of it also.”
In a separate interview, Mark Ruffalo touched on the importance of the actors having a history with these characters. “I joke with people that this is like doing a TV show where you shoot one episode every three years,” Ruffalo said. “There’s a continuity to it. And when we talked about it with Marvel or Kevin [Feige] we really do talk about it as the character’s progression.”
“The characters feel like they’re making a journey, you know?” Ruffalo concluded. “And it does feel like one goes to the next and goes to the next. It feels like a long serial, which is nice, I think.”
Where will these journeys lead Earth’s mightiest heroes? We’ll find out soon enough. The secrets will be revealed when Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters on April 27.
Images: Disney
