At San Diego Comic Con 2016, OMFGTV had the chance to sit down with the cast and creative team behind the Marvel television show, “Agents of SHIELD” which is about to enter its fourth season.
Following the cliffhanger of season 3, Daisy (Chloe Bennet) has left SHIELD and become a vigilante known as Quake, leaving the SHIELD team to try to find her.
“Quake has gone rouge, she’s away from the squad, she looks like she’s on her way to a Nine Inch Nails concert,” quipped Clark Gregg, who plays Phil Coulson. “And Coulson feels very guilty about what she did while under the sway of Hive and the way that contributed to the factors that caused Lincoln’s death. And she’s blaming herself a lot and that’s where we start out.”
Bennet herself had this to say on the topic of Daisy’s departure: “I know it feels like what she’s doing and running off and going rogue is kind of selfish, but I think in her mind, it’s the most selfless thing she could possibly do. I don’t know if she’s aware of it, but that’s what she’s doing without knowing it.”
A major topic was last season’s standout episode, “4,722 Hours” in which Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) was left on an alien planet for months to survive.
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“I didn’t believe it,” Henstridge said about the episode. “I thought it was a brilliant idea, very brave, and I was flattered that they would entrust me with working every day when I’m usually there about four times a week. But I just didn’t think that it would pass through all the different layers of signing off and production and all that different stuff and it was so different from everything that we had ever done. And then, all of a sudden, the script was there and I was learning my lines and it was happening.”
“Those episodes don’t happen without the most incredible crew and the most creative production staff,” Henstridge continued. “The writer, Craig Titley, was just… he wrote a beautiful script and the foundation had to be in ‘Agents of SHIELD,’ but it was so different and it had to be so creative and different in all these ways and he just killed it.”
Bennet and Henstridge also discussed saying goodbye to Brett Dalton’s character of Grant Ward, who was killed off this season.
“It was really hard,” Bennet said. “Our last day of shooting was our fight sequence. That was hard, it was emotional between the characters and it was emotional between me and Brett… but on the last take, we both had tears in our eyes and they called a wrap and we both started crying.” “There’s going to be a huge Brett-sized hole in our hearts for sure,” Henstridge added.
“What we always set out to do,” said head of Marvel Television Jeph Loeb. “Was tell a story about people who work for an organization that is kind of hard to root for when you think about it. Here’s a spy organization that violates your civil rights and takes you away in the middle of the night… and the real challenge was always how do you make that work. And what Jed (Whedon) and Maurissa (Tancheroen) and Jeff (Bell) did so brilliantly was that they made it a show about family.”
On the topic of the addition of Ghost Rider to season 4, Bennet was reluctant to reveal details- thanks to the Marvel employee nearby- but said that, “we work with each other a bit in the first episode. But I’m more excited to see how Simmons would react to the technicalities of his burning skull!”
“Agents of SHIELD” returns Tuesday, September 20 at 10 PM on ABC.