SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot developments in Episode 2 of Marvel Studios’ “Secret Invasion,” currently streaming on Disney+.
Samuel L. Jackson has played the super spy Nick Fury in 11 movies for Marvel Studios. Sometimes, he’s appeared in only a brief cameo; other times, he’s been the second or third lead in a movie with “Captain” in the title. In every appearance, Jackson exudes preternatural calm and cunning as one of the most formidable, non-superpowered humans in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it wasn’t until the actor’s first foray as the lead in an MCU project — the Disney+ series “Secret Invasion” — that Marvel has really addressed the fact that Nick Fury is also a Black man who grew up in America.
“We very seldom deal with Nick Fury in that way,” Jackson says.
In “Secret Invasion,” Fury is at the ebb of his authority. Rattled by the Blip, he’d decamped to a space station orbiting Earth, but he gets pulled back home by his friend Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), one of the shapeshifting Skrulls Fury helped to save in “Captain Marvel,” to stop a separatist sect of Skrulls led by the fanatical Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir). In the June 21 premiere episode, Fury and Talos fail to stop Gravik from bombing a public square Moscow.
In Episode 2, Fury demands a meeting with James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle), the Air Force colonel and former Avenger who fought alongside Fury as War Machine. Fury’s surprised to discover that not only does Rhodes already know about the Skrull threat, he rebukes Fury’s request for support to stop it. So Fury tries to evoke their common experience as Black men inside the halls of power — including Fury’s experience unwittingly working for secret Hydra agent Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) from “Captain America: The Winter Solider.”
“Men who look like us don’t get promoted because of who our daddies know,” Fury tells Rhodes. “Every ounce of power that we wrestle from the vice grip of the mediocre Alexander Pierces who run this world was earned in blood. So let’s make the power mean something. Help a brother out.”
For Jackson, the scene was a chance to unpack how Fury and Rhodes have faced the world in a way he’s never gotten to do in Marvel’s movies. Jackson says he talked with the show’s writers about what it’s like for Fury to have “that much power as a Black man, and how they can be diminished at any moment by someone else just saying a specific thing or changing the trajectory of one’s career path because of it.”
“Rhodey and Fury have risen to this place where we have a certain amount of power, even though we’re better than the people who have power, we still got to suppress ourselves in a specific way,” Jackson continues. “And Marvel’s not afraid to let us explore that.”
That exploration eventually became even more personal for Jackson. Earlier in Episode 2, Fury and Talos escape Moscow on a train, and Fury begins talking about his experience as a kid riding with his mother on the train to Detroit from his home in Alabama, when they’d have to bring their meals in a shoebox because “we couldn’t go in the dining car.”
Filmmaker Ali Selim (“The Looming Tower”), who directed every episode of “Secret Invasion,” says that the story came directly from Jackson. “It wasn’t on the page. It was him telling us a story,” he says. “He’s very connected to Nick Fury in a way that no writer ever could be.”
“I used to take the train every summer from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Washington, D.C.,” Jackson says. “I couldn’t go in a dining car because it’s segregated. When they put me on the train, they gave me a shoebox with food in it, then I ate that food. We used things that were real for me as a person to give Nick Fury the kind of history that he has, to inform the story in a real way about, you know, how he wasn’t always this [powerful], or he does look at America in another kind of way.”
Kingsley Ben-Adir as Gravik in “Secret Invasion.”
Gareth Gatrell / Courtesy of Marvel Studios
The effort has made “Secret Invasion” unusually trenchant for a Marvel project; along with the “Black Panther” films, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and “Ms. Marvel,” it’s one of the few to directly address topics of racial identity in America. After Fury tells Talos about his childhood train rides, Talos confesses that over a million Skrull refugees have been secretly living on Earth for years, a revelation that shocks Fury. “Humans can’t coexist with each other, Talos!” he bellows. “There is not enough room or tolerance on this planet for another species!”
“It’s the same problem we have right now,” Jackson says, referencing the geopolitical tensions caused by influxes of human immigrants and refugees on our planet. “How do you let all those people cross the border, not to mention how people will react? I mean, they don’t like, brown [and] Black people. What do you think you’re gonna do with some green people?”
Selim — whose mother is white and from Minnesota and father is Arab and from Egypt — also sees a broader meaning in Fury’s struggle on the show. “I’ve lived in the Arab world. I’ve lived in the Midwest. I always feel a little bit other,” he says. “I think at the core of Nick Fury’s journey as a Black man in America, the more universal sense of that is a story about the other: the other that’s in himself, the other he feels in society.”
That metaphor can only go so far on a comic book show, however. Ben-Adir says he had “hours and hours” of conversations with the show’s producers about Gravik — who we learn met Fury in the late 1990s as a child — and what is driving his campaign for Skrull independence on Earth.
“He trusts no one, loves no one, cares about no one, and is living solely to see Nick Fury and Talos experience as much of the pain that he felt as possible,” Ben-Adir says. “He’s playing with them in a way that kind of feels sociopathic, to say the least.”
So Ben-Adir decided to lean into that, playing Gravik as a sociopath driven utterly by revenge, rather than a freedom fighter striving for the greater good of his people. The latter, Ben-Adir says, “means nothing to him — it’s just a way to manipulate people around him so he can do what he needs to do to make [Fury and Talos] feel the pain.”
It is perhaps a surprising choice for the actor, given the appeal of playing a character whose core beliefs are righteous even if his means aren’t. But that approach did not appeal to Ben-Adir, who wanted to avoid drawing too clear of a line between the sci-fi conceits of “Secret Invasion” and the very real and complicated realities of refugees in the real world. “I was like, we do not have the time to explore this properly in the show,” he says. “We need to be careful. The messaging of it, especially being a person of color — I thought it was very risky.”