Olivia Colman in talks to join the Skrulls on Disney Plus' Secret Invasion
TV Features Olivia Colman
Another accomplished actor is about to be consumed by the superhero movie machine, or at least the slightly smaller superhero TV spin-off machine, with The Hollywood Reporter saying that Olivia Colman is “in negotiations” to join the cast of Marvel Studios’ upcoming Disney+ series Secret Invasion. A tie-in with Captain Marvel, the series will focus on Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury and Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos (one of the shape-shifting alien Skrulls who seemed like bad guys but were actually pretty nice), with Kingsley Ben-Adir from One Night In Miami playing the “likely villain.” That’s all we know, but the Secret Invasion event in the comics was all about Skrulls replacing several key people—including superheroes—on Earth as part of a, you know, secret invasion. It’s safe to assume that something similar will be happening here.
As for who Colman might play, we have some guesses. She could be Vernake, queen of the Skrulls at the time of Secret Empire and the main antagonist from the comic, but why pick the obvious choice? Wouldn’t it be much cooler if she were playing someone like Kl’rt, the Super-Skrull? Of course, Kl’rt’s whole thing is that he has all the powers of the Fantastic Four, and the Fantastic Four don’t exist in the MCU yet, so it would be pretty confusing to have Olivia Colman show up with fire powers, rock powers, invisible powers, and stretchy powers with no explanation. Then again, it would also be really cool and we would love to see that. It’s a tough call.
67 Comments
I hope the Queen of England turns out to be a Skrull. Would explain a lot.
Yeah alright, David Icke.
Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, an underrated terrific Marvel character, needs to be in this as well, obviouslyAlso I would appreciate Karen Gillan as Nebula being in it
Ah, so you’re hoping for a stealth Eleventh Hour reunion? Someone get Arthur Darvill’s agent on the line…
That or she could meet Kilgrave and have a Broadchurch reunion. (Arthur Darvill could come along for that one as well.)
throw Chloe Bennet in as Daisy Johnson and I’m content for all of time
Or… and I’m just spitballing. Use someone who can actually act.
eat shit
Oh you, she did increasingly better over time in Agents of SHIELD and in this humble commenter’s opinion, she did fine as Daisy Johnson.
what a terrible take! try again
You could douse her with a firehose and she still couldn’t act wet.
Daisy and Sousa, agents of SWORD!
you’re goddamn right. with occasional calls to FitzSimmons for science questions… and liaisons with Mack for SHIELD stuff…. you know what I just want the whole cast back
Cobie Smulders is also underrated and terrific. It’s a little weird that they cast her to just basically be Fury’s straightman for 10 years. I keep hoping they give her more to do. She’s like the one comedic actor they hired that they don’t really let be funny.
Huh, I never really watched Agents of SHIELD so I didn’t know she was on it that much. Definitely much more personality than in any of the movies.
Maria Hill and May (her old friend) were in particular fun playing off each other. And of course it spoke well of Maria that she always hated Ward
Maria Hill’s greatest contribution to Agents of SHIELD, was a throwaway line about having to explain “who or what is a Man Thing?”.
All we need now is a follow up with an actual live action appearance of said Man Thing.
Yeah, to me it seems very likely that Maria Hill will be in. Spider-Man: Far From Home would at least imply that she’s still working with Fury in some form. I’ll be very curious, assuming they keep doing the “Marvel Legends” recap videos, whether the Fury and Hill recaps would include their Shield appearances or not.
Olivia Colman is amazing, so real and funny. Her performance in the final episode of s1 of Broadchurch could not be better
Hopefully they’ll include the Skrull Cows…You see, in Fantastic Four #2, Reed Richards tricked the scouting force for an invasion of Earth by the Skrulls being hypnotized and transformed to think they were cows to prevent them from going back to the Skrull Empire.Than, during the Kree-Skrull War, the three Skrull Cows were revived by the Skrull Empire and attacked Vision.After the Kree-Skrull War ended, the US Government re-hypnotized the Skrull Cows back into being cows. Than, somehow, some of the Skrull Cows wound up in a slaughterhouse where the Skrull Cow meat was turned into burger meat which gave whoever didn’t get sick and died superpowers and an irrational hatred of Skrulls.
At some point, the surviving Skrull Cows started breeding with regular cows, creating Skrull-Cow Hybrids. After the events of Secret Invasion, some Skrulls stayed behind to try and gather as many of the Skull Cows and Skrull-Cow Hybrids as they could on a sanctuary in South Dakota.
Well that’s disturbing.
Silver Age comics were weird.
AV Club should hire you as a “context contributor”.
BSE is a caused by a prion, not a virus. So the line about the skrull meat containing a virus like BSE is terrible science. What has happened to comic books? They used to be valuable sources of knowledge, in which realistic things like bites from radioactive spiders gave spider-related powers.
You mean my dreams of grazing pastures and chasing flies with my tail don’t come from the regular cow DNA I’ve ingested ?
Please tell me this somehow ties into Bova raising Wanda and Pietro.
No, Bova is a member of a species called the “Nu-Men”, a race of animal-human hybrids created by the High Evolutionary.
So we don’t know what happens if the Nu-men cows eat Skrull-cow burgers or drink Skrull-cow meat. That’s probably the next crossover event right there. Somehow also involving symbiotes.
Nice job! There was also FF Annual #17 (after the Kree-Skrull War but before the slaughterhouse) where the Skrull cow’s milk caused the townspeople people who drank it to become violent and change shape. Although Reed explains how it wasn’t exactly milk in some Marvel science mumbo jumbo… At the end of the story the FF save the town but some of the Skrull not milk survives and gets delivered to a military base, but not sure that was followed up on.
If they’re being milked for something that isn’t milk I really don’t want to know
Ah, the Skrull Kill Krew, complete with a violent White Supremacist as a member.
Yeah this was definitely Morrison at their “edgiest” and pretty tame for Millar.
You know I used to be really impressed by your comic knowledge (and don’t get me wrong I still am) but now I’m more impressed by how you manage to post to Kinja with images and decent formatting. I can’t even post from my phone or iPad as the publish button doesn’t work…
Prior to the Skrull Kill Krew comic Byrne had done an annual about the people drinking the milk from these cows in the 80’s, correct?
This reminds me of the end one of the funniest Mitchell and Webb sketches…“…(gasps) Aliens?”
Although what really does it is that she isn’t freaked out. It’s just mildly interesting like seeing a biplane overhead.
It didn’t really seem so obvious until the last few years, but it’s very clear that Marvel had a casting philosphy fairly early on: It’s easier to sell comedic actors as action stars than to sell action stars as comedians. It’s also easier to take a shlubby funny guy and make him live in the gym for six months than it is to teach someone to grow a funny bone.
You can direct funny comedians to hit the dramatic notes, but you can’t teach funny as easily. It’s like everyone liked Keaton as Batman, then forgot about that in favor of matinee idols and roided out mannequins for 20 years. I know Olivia Colman is doing “serious” work now but her comedic chops are well established, and this fits the Marvel pattern to a T.
That’s because comedy acting is much, much harder, which naturally is recognised annually by the Academy.
I have to admit, the SI comic and Battlestar Galactica (and maybe something else from around the time?) really burned the “oh no, that person you’ve been working with for years is actually a perfectly human-appearing space monster” shit out of me. You’d think I’d be over it by now, but man, that turned out to be pretty long-term, I really appreciate it when characters are who they say they are.
The Secret Invasion comic is one that I was extremely frustrated by during its release because the entire line basically became all-skrull, all the time for the great bulk of 2008 which was extremely tiresome. DC went all in on Final Crisis shortly thereafter.It wasn’t the best period given the entire lines of both companies were totally consumed by these two crossovers, neither of which read well in single issues.I’ve re-read both in the past decade and they both work a hell of a lot better read in a sitting than month-to-month.Marvel didn’t do itself any favours by hyping the shit out of Secret Invasion and insisting this was going to be the climax of Bendis’ long-running Avengers story arc, only to of course reveal at the end that it wasn’t really, that being Siege in early 2010.On the upside, Dark Reign was pretty good and led to some really good stories.On the downside, Bendis really should have left the Avengers books after Siege. He never quite seemed as engaged afterwards during the limp and uninspiring “heroic age” thing Marvel mandated through until his departure in 2012 with End Times and Age of Ultron.
Yeah, unless shape-shifter stories have pretty strict rules, they have the potential to be really, really annoying. Plot twists that rely entirely on actively lying to the audience or undoing long stretches of established story development tend to be grating rather than intriguing. A single, targeted, catch-able doppelganger can make for a fun story, especially if the audience is in on the gag. But a whole army of them muddying the waters does make for a pretty irritating story. Hopefully this one avoids the pitfalls.
“…tits…”
Marvel’s casting is so fucking good. I hope that WandaVision especially showed pedigreed actors that they don’t just have to take fun little cameo roles – there’s real meat here, substance, that just happens to be in the MCU. It’s evolving and you can help it along.God, I’m such a fanboy. I need to rewatch Thor 2 and Age of Ultron to bring myself back down a bit.
I have tried that and it doesn’t work. Instead of bringing you down it just makes you decide that you like Thor 2 and Age of Ultron more(That hulk/Iron man fight is GREAT)
SssssssiiiiiiiiiggggggghhhhhhhhCan someone please take a stand against the IP boondoggle? Can anyone with talent stay away from the media monopoly mouse’s nerd culture pandering?Sorry, let me amend that. Someone I give a shit about.
In a word, no. Ethan Hawke spent ages railing against it, until they offered him a job.
I understand the sentiment enough to have upvoted this comment, BUT I happen to really enjoy seeing vastly overqualified actors in silly movies. Not in a tragic end-of-career way, but in a fun guest-star way. I love having a Vincent Price or an Eli Wallach in the Adam West Batman series. A Max von Sydow in Flash Gordon. A Ruth Gordon in Any Which Way But loose. It amuses me. Plus I enjoy watching super good acting in genres of movies that, generally, do not require it (I often mention it, but spectacular action scenes with the super genuine emoting expressions of Chris Evans, Uma Thurman or Harrison Ford are a particular delight to me, and I see them as great showcase of acting excellence, a form of beyond-duty multitasking).So, yes, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I heard that Alexander fucking Dane was about to play in a tv science-fiction series. That’s awesome, I never thought he was the type !
Even after his performance of Richard The III got 5 curtain calls!
Counter point: Nope
Did I MAKE a point for you to counter? No. It’s a clearly hyperbolic expression of an opinion.
Counter point: Nope
Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Counter point: Nope
All right, rule of threes. This is funny.
first: they pay, second: they’re probably either a lot of fun to do or you get treated really well (and free tickets to Disney World…which is a lot of money), third: what Disney is doing at this point is taking the movies they were going to make anyway: buddy comedy, spy thriller (Winter Soldier and the TV series of him have the same “Days of the Condor” feel), etc., and then just making it with characters in the Marvel universe, that way they can throw in the special effects kids have grown to love. Star Wars is never going to do a take on Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, but they’ll remake Seven Samurai with it again and might eventually go so far as a High and Low or a Ran, as long as things go boom. It could be worse.
You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. There’s no need to argue this. In fact I feel really dumb for inviting this kind of response by expressing a frustration that I KNEW would engender fucking debate. More the fool me for thinking I could just vent about this.
yes, there is a difference between saying something out loud to yourself and your cat and saying it in a place with “reply” buttonsbut my point includes that it isn’t “nerd culture” pandering, it is dominant pop culture, ask the doofuses storming the capital and hitting cops while wearing Captain America shirts
What the fuck ever about the difference between nerd culture and mainstream culture. They are currently the same *because* of pandering. Nerds got disposable income and entered positions of influence and mainstream corporatists realized they could be fleeced. And I find it slightly depressing when artists I respect get sucked in, especially by Disney. None of the media conglomos are great but Disney is fucking gross because of how badly they want us to believe that they aren’t gross.Also, I *may* be listening to the Knowledge Fight podcast and getting worked up by how goddam stupid Alex Jones is…
the response to Alex Jones is turn it off, even second hand. Listening to that shit is self-harm. They need to have a thing for seniors like blocking porn-sites for kids but you block OAN RTV Newsmax and Fox, stopping exposure is the first more important step. “Q: Why do I keep bleeding?” “A: Well, the first thing to do is you have to stop cutting yourself for a little while”I think your rage in this case is incoherent because that isn’t nerd culture anymore, and because there is a difference between LARPing and some bro reading Batman. Nobody ever said “I’m not going to go see Heath Ledger as the Joker because that shit is for NERDS!”All media conglomos are gross, but Disney delivers a very high quality product and pays the people involved a lot of money. Yes they are going to continue to “accidentally” support genocide like with Mulan, and despite Disney’s very helpful support for same sex benefits and then marriage equality, every gay character will have no lines related to that or there will be a cut scene where a woman looks longingly at a book of Emily Dickinson. But superheroes are just the medium and watch the movie Soul, it’s really good.
Disney also fired a ton of park employees when they didn’t really need to. Disney also continues to push copyright statutes. Disney also aggressively pursues conglomeration and fights anti-trust laws. Disney is as progressive as their PR department encourages them to be.
then we should all make their PR indivisible from their business practices so they can’t back out of thingsbut do I think Disney is run by robot nazis? not really.
I hope the writers are aware we’ll root for her side however awful it may be.
Soon there will be more actors inside than outside the MCU.
You know secret casting doesn’t work if you spoil it like this, right?
considering that, in Peep Show and That Mitchell and Webb Look, Olivia Colman was one of the funniest people on TV, I just hope they will let her be funny.