Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Secret Invasion episode one.
Secret Invasion has hit our screens finally with the first episode airing last Wednesday. The whole premise of the show is not knowing who you can trust as Skrulls have infiltrated Earth, disguising and hiding among us. Already, a firm fixture of the MCU has fallen prey to their deception, with Agent Maria Hill gunned down in Russia, but actress Cobie Smulders is more surprised at how her ending stayed in the dark.
Despite the show being all about secrets, her fate in the first episode is one secret that Smulders is amazed wasn’t leaked. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she said that whilst filming her death scene, “There were a lot of people around, so I’m surprised that there wasn’t an image that got leaked. I guess that’s the respect that Marvel has earned over the last decade, which is like, ‘Don’t spoil it for people.’ And nobody did, thankfully.”
This scene, despite being set in Russia, was actually filmed in my own hometown of Halifax, West Yorkshire in the U.K. with the location of Maria Hill’s last stand shot in the Piece Hall. Whilst watching the episode myself, there were moments where I thought to myself, “This looks more like the mills in Yorkshire than Russia to me,” and I was rewarded when I identified that it was, in fact, my old stomping ground. So we have the good people of Halifax to thank for keeping schtum on the whole shock ending.
The actress has been a part of the MCU, and the right-hand woman to Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury since we met her in the first Avengers movie in 2012. She has appeared in numerous MCU films since then, notably in Spider-Man: Far From Home as well as Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and has become as steady a character as her boss and mentor, Fury. Her demise at the hands of a Skrull presenting as Fury then is particularly cold, and will likely set a fire in him that the Skrulls will wish they never sparked.
Speaking to Variety about whether this is the end for her, the actress responded “It feels like the end? But it’s such a vast, complicated, multiverse world that Marvel is living in. So I suppose anything is possible. This is all above my level of access, so I don’t know.” Much like how Hill was always there for Fury so too will Smulders be available to the Marvel, telling THR “I will always answer the call.”
You can catch Smulders, perhaps for the last time, in the first episode of Secret Invasion now streaming on Disney Plus, the second episode airs on June, 28.
