When Marvel is filming a movie, it’s a notoriously secret affair. The company wants to keep plot details under wraps so fans can be genuinely surprised in the theater. Even if you’re acting in the movie, there are times when you only get to see part of the script.
This means you might have shot all your scenes and still not know how a movie ends. This is exactly what happened to Angelina Jolie and Kumail Nanjiani for Eternals.
Jolie, who plays Thena in the movie, and Nanjiani, who plays Kingo, appeared on the D23 Inside Disney podcast about what it was like to film a Marvel movie with that level of secrecy. The conversation starts around 17:25 with this question:
“As we all have come to know there’s a lot of secrecy involved in anything Marvel. I have to ask you both, did you get to read the entire script, or were there parts in the final film that even surprised the two of you when you saw it?”
WARNING: Spoilers ahead!
Jolie answered first, saying that working on a Marvel script is a one-of-a-kind experience.
“There was a final script but I don’t know if that’s just secrets or also all the individual character development that everybody was doing as it was going along. So you would be surprised by your fellow actors, or something they added or some choice was made that made something more than you’d expect.
I went into it still not sure what the end was going to be. I knew what happened to me at the end but then I was surprised what happened to some of the other people in the end. I had no idea. I had no idea what happened to the other group in the end until I saw the movie.”
Nanjiani agreed.
“I had no idea how it was going to end,” he said. “We had a version of the full script it kept evolving because as Angie said characters kept developing.
He then told Jolie that “I did not know that you guys shot that thing on the ship at the end.”
“And I didn’t didn’t know until about 12 before I shot the ship at the end and I was trying to figure out who was there and what happened to everybody else,” she answered.
The two are referring to a post-credits scene where Harry Styles appears as Eros.
“Well this is what happens,” Nanjiani quips. “You guys are flying around space on a spaceship with One Direction and the rest of us have been taken captive by the strongest being in the universe.”
“Right,” Jolie said. “I think I got the better side of that one.”
You can check out Eternals in theaters now.
