Secret Invasion Director: 'Stunning' Don Cheadle/Samuel L. Jackson Scene Was 'Like A Play' For 'Two Brilliant Actors'
The following contains a spoiler or two from Secret Invasion Episode 2, now streaming on Disney+.
The latest Secret Invasion episode's six-minute sit-down between Colonel James "Rhodey" Rhodes and Nick Fury was fraught with tension for the characters, yet an absolute — and overdue — delight for longtime MCU colleagues Don Cheadle and Samuel L. Jackson.
As Jackson recently told TVLine (in the video below), he found it "really wonderful" to at long last get a scene like that with Cheadle. Ali Selim, the director for all six Secret Invasion episodes, meanwhile gives kudos to two "brilliant" actors and a "really great" script by Brian Tucker and Brant Englestein.
You do not want to be playing 'Mine is bigger than yours' with job titles right now, Fury,. Trust me, I'm the last friend you've got.
A lot is said, and happens, in the pivotal encounter, as Fury and Rhodey compare notes in the wake of Fury being framed for the rebel Skrulls' bombing of a public square in Moscow. For starters, Fury learns that Rhodey has known about Skrulls-on-Earth for some 15 years. Then, when he nudges Rhodey to "help a brother out" by taking the world's crosshairs off his back, Rhodey instead proceeds to fire his friend.
Men who look like us don't get promoted because of who our daddies know. Every ounce of power we wrestle from the mediocre Alexander Pierces who run this world was earned in blood. So let's make the power mean something. Help a brother out!
You should know better than most that the reason we wrestle the power from mediocre men who don't look like us was not simply to turn around and hand it to men who do. The point of this power is to be uncompromising, be unsparing — to sit across from a man we greatly admire, who we share an entire professional, personal and ancestral history with, and tell him without any reservation that he's fired.
All told, it's a conversation that spans extraterrestrial invasion, global politics, and the burdens placed on successful Black men. Unusually pithy fodder for Marvel.
Invited to break down his direction of the gripping conversation, Ali Selim replied, "I can't say much, because it's two of our greatest living actors — who have wanted to work together for decades, if i understand correctly, and have never had the opportunity. And they were handed a brilliant piece of text that went on for eight pages. It was like a play for the two of them."
Allowing the men proper privacy to discuss these extremely top-secret matters was a grand, vacated bar — the real-life Berners Tavern in London.
"I found an amazing location that gave them a lot of headroom and a lot of space," Selim recalls, "and I made sure that the scene was written so that there were no other people in the bar, clanking glasses or vacuuming or whatever happens in a real life bar situation. And then I just watched them work. And it was stunning."
I'm Nick Fury. Even when I'm out, I'm in.
So stunning was the work by the Academy Award recipients, "I think I remember giving a note, but that's it," Selim shares. "Because there's not much you can do with two brilliant actors like that who already understand the emotional truth of the scene. It was a really good text."
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