The MCU began life in Iron Man as a mirror of our own world. And, despite featuring world-ending alien armies, the existence of the Norse gods, actual magic and half of all living things being obliterated, in practice, day-to-day life in the MCU still resembles our own.
This mirroring of reality has brought with it a strange paradox, though. If these movies can show us, say, Star Wars within the MCU, what does it mean that Nick Fury’s played by Samuel L Jackson, who plays Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels?
The MCU spiraled even further down the rabbit hole with a reference to the Kevin Smith film Mallrats in Captain Marvel. If Mallrats is a movie within the MCU, then Stan Lee exists as a comic book creator in-universe, which has big cosmological implications. Is your head hurting yet?
Thankfully, Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo, who may know the MCU better than anyone, have now set the record straight, with the former saying: “They just look like those characters,” before Joe chimed in with: “Yes, Nick Fury just happens to look like Samuel L. Jackson.”
The pair do concede that Fury’s life as a secret agent super spy was probably complicated by looking and sounding exactly like one of Hollywood’s most famous actors. However, given that nobody ever mistakes one for the other in the movies, he seems to have dealt with the problem.
That still leaves the head-scratcher of where the ‘real’ Stan Lee fits into the MCU, though. He can’t be the creator of Iron Man, Hulk and Spider-Man (among many others) in the franchise, so I think the best theory is simply that Lee’s some kind of extra-dimensional trickster God who can move through the universe at will, observing events from the background. At least, that’s our take on it.
