Secret Invasion Director Ali Selim on Season Finale, Mixed Reviews

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Marvel’s “Secret Invasion,” now streaming on Disney+.

Marvel’s “Secret Invasion,” a six-episode event series on Disney+, ended Wednesday with a 37-minute finale that wrapped up the MCU’s first standalone story focused on Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury.

Ali Selim, an executive producer, directed all six episodes of the show, which adapted a popular Marvel Comics run that plays on the audience’s paranoia. “Secret Invasion” asks what it if the characters you thought you knew and loved were instead alien invaders — a.k.a. Skrulls, an alien race introduced in 2019’s “Captain Marvel” — posing as them? Then, as the show’s tagline wonders, “Who do you trust?”

Ahead of “Secret Invasion’s” premiere episode, Selim told Variety that if he, like the Skrulls, could shape-shift into any Marvel character, he’d like to become Nick Fury. As the architect behind the Avengers initiative, Jackson’s character has loomed large over the MCU since he first appeared in the post-credits scene for 2008’s “Iron Man,” but his backstory has largely gone unexplored. Thus, Selim’s aims for the spy thriller were simple: He hoped to present Fury’s “perplexing and resonant inner life.”

While the series seems to have accomplished that goal — by introducing Fury’s wife Priscilla (Charlayne Woodard), who was revealed to be a Skrull operative named Varra, for example — other aspects have proven less popular (i.e. the show’s A.I.-generated opening credits sequence, designed by Method Studios to underline the show’s “shape-shifting” plot, but divided fans on social media.) Though Selim was open to all critiques, reporters were instructed not to ask about A.I. in the interviews conducted Wednesday after the episode aired.

The tightly-packed finale focuses on “the last stand of the great Nick Fury,” a phrase that Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir) — the show’s villain and the leader of the Skrull rebellion — bellows when the two men face off one last time. It’s a moment that plays for high drama as Fury attempts to squelch the uprising with the help of MI6 agent Sonya Falsworth (Olivia Colman), Varra and G’iah (Emilia Clarke), daughter of Fury’s closest Skrull ally Talos (Ben Mendelsohn).

Their mission: find a way to separate U.S. President Ritson (Dermot Mulroney) from his closest adviser, Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes (Don Cheadle, playing a Skrull named Raava, who has been posing as the man also known as War Machine for an undisclosed amount of time) and stop the commander in chief from bombing a camp of Skrull refugees in Russia, which could start a world war.

The first part of the plan sees Fury and Sonya retrieve “The Harvest,” a collection of the Avengers’ DNA from their world-saving faceoff in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” when superhuman blood spilled all over the battle field. It turns out that Gravik was among the team Fury sent to collect the specimens, and he wanted to use it to create a race of Super Skrulls. For part two of the plan, Fury will deliver that vial — which, most importantly, contains Captain Marvel’s blood — to Gravik.

When Gravik turns on the machine designed to infuse him (and an ailing Fury) with the superpowers, he quickly realizes he’s been outsmarted via a carefully planned bait-and-switch, and he must fight G’iah for Super Skrull supremacy. During the high-flying battle, the two superbeings demonstrate various Avengers skills (including those of Groot, the Hulk, Mantis, Drax, Thanos and his Black Order), with G’iah delivering the fatal blow by using a Captain Marvel’s energy.

Meanwhile, the real Nick Fury corners President Ritson at the hospital where he’s recovering from the rebel Skrulls’ attack on his convoy in Episode 4, and convinces him that “Rhodey” is, in fact, in league with Gravik and they’re using him to take over the world. A tense stand-off ends with Raava/Rhodey taking a bullet to the purple brain, revealing to the president that Skrulls have infiltrated the highest levels of government.

The fallout is swift — President Ritson declares war on all extraterrestrial beings, inciting widespread violence and forcing the Skrulls deeper into hiding. The move also brings G’iah (who now appears to be the MCU’s most powerful being) into an alliance with Sonya in order to protect her fellow refugees.

The episode ends with Fury heading back to the space station on S.A.B.E.R., resuming his mission to find the Skrulls a new home. As he reunites with Varra, he mentions the chance for renewed peace talks with their Kree enemies, setting the stage for “The Marvels,” which hits theaters in November.

On Wednesday afternoon, Selim joined Variety via Zoom from his home in Portland, Oregon to discuss the finale’s big reveals and his future in the MCU.

Now that the series finale has aired, how would you describe “Secret Invasion’s” overall message? Is there a particular scene from the finale that underlines that for you?

The theme that interested me in these scripts and in this story was the theme of other. How do we confront the other in our neighborhood? How do we confront the other in ourselves? How do we reconcile love that doesn’t seem to fit into a socially acceptable box? Sam Jackson and I had a lot of conversations about that; Kingsley Ben-Adir and I had a lot of conversations about that.

Ultimately, the scene that I pushed for and really enjoyed is when Nick Fury kisses Varra at the end. That is releasing the sense of “other” in himself that has been a constraint or a prejudice. It’s opening up the world to conversation, if not all out love and embracing. It’s the very last scene of the series, and it really feels like that’s what it’s about.

Is this the season finale or series finale — what is the language?

Oh, yeah, I would say “season” finale. Who knows, right?

Have you heard about Season 2? What do you know?

I don’t know anything about Season 2. I think there’s some great threads that could be run down. But is there a Season 2? I have no idea.

Audiences have gotten conditioned to this idea of the “super-sized” season finale, but “Secret Invasion’s” episodes got shorter as the show went along. What was the vision for that?

“Vision” is a really big word, and I appreciate your using it, but it’s really just practical exploration and the practical evolution of a story. It’s written one way; actors start performing it and it becomes something slightly different; and when you start filming the performances, it becomes something slightly different; and then when you go to edit it, you realign yourself.

I don’t mean to make it practical film school stuff, but ultimately, you just watch the cuts, and you say, “That’s too long.” “That’s unfocused.” “Looked good on the page, sounded good on the set, not helping our story at this point.” And there’s also some sense of ramping up to an explosive ending — which to my mind means you go faster, not bigger and bloatier.

That honestly makes sense. But that has been one of the questions that’s been floated online — a critique, if you will — is why make this a TV series versus a movie? Was a movie framework ever discussed? Maybe a TV movie like “Werewolf by Night”?

That’s a great question. By the time I came on board, scripts were written, and we were talking about six episodes. So, I don’t know. I do know that some point along the way “Armor Wars” shifted from a series to a movie for various reasons that I don’t know.

What have you made of the reaction to the series overall? Because reviews have been mixed.

Oh, I don’t read reviews. With all due respect. For me, I view all the storytelling work I do as a dialogue with an audience. When the show is finished and put up on the screen, that’s my half of the dialogue. And the audience then starts their half of the response to it. I think that’s valuable, but I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer the question.

I don’t feel bad about mixed reviews. If you had unanimously good reviews, every movie would gross $10 billion, trillion dollars, right? [Projects] resonate with different people at different times for different reasons, and Marvel has a very devoted — even rabid — fan base who have expectations and when their expectations aren’t fulfilled, they move in the other direction; they give it a thumbs down.

I don’t know — is it our job to fulfill their expectations? Or to tell the story that we’re telling? So, it’s a tricky thing. I would love it if everybody loved it, but I also don’t have that expectation myself, so I feel great about the response to it.

It’s a different story than Marvel has ever really told. Let’s dive into some of the actual plot points of the finale. One of the highlights was the massive showdown between G’iah and Gravik — whose powers have been enhanced by the Avengers’ DNA. What will you remember about working with Emilia and Kingsley on that fight scene?

It’s interesting — they’re both stellar actors who bring a lot of electricity and, in most instances, in very quiet ways. I’m deeply moved by some of the subtlest choices that Emilia Clarke makes. I think she could do no wrong.

When you get to a heavily choreographed fight scene or bombing sequence or an ambush sequence, it’s just kind of fun, right? It’s actors being like, “OK, I don’t have to bring it today. I just have to be a 12-year-old swinging from a rope.” So, there’s a lot of fun in those moments and there’s a lot of danger. But it’s not as emotionally significant or emotionally resonant as the quiet moment in Episode 5 where she and Nick Fury discussed Talos’ death.

The fight sequences become mathematical, mechanical, precise. “Did we get it?” “Yes.” “Move on.” It comes together later in edit, and then you congratulate your mathematics and your mechanics; you don’t congratulate the emotional resonance.

I will ask you a nerdier question about that scene. This seems to be introducing G’iah’s Super Skrull as Marvel’s new most powerful being. How was it decided which Avengers’ powers she was going to get to show off?

Well, simply put, it comes from Kevin Feige, who says, “It’s all fair game.” That’s best expressed in the moment when Gravik takes the vial from Nick Fury, puts it in the computer where it is analyzed, and we see all the pure superpowers ever. That’s like the moment where we’re like, “OK, this is going to be something.”

We storyboard those sequences for month. I had two storyboard artists working on it — Aaron Sows in L.A., who’s a Marvel fanatic, and Ian McCaffrey in Dublin, Ireland, who is a little more of a choreographer and less involved in the MCU. And together, the two of them found a rhythm between superpowers that had meaning and superpowers that had choreography and elegance. Then those storyboards go to stunts, and stunts work out that some of those movements are impossible to do. And then it goes to visual effects [who] say, “I know this is what we planned, but it looks funny, so let’s maybe go from this arm to a different arm, because we want it to be more elegant.”

So, the decisions are Kevin Feige, then story and then just practicality.

Tell me about Don Cheadle playing Raava and “Rhodey.” It’s mentioned that Col. Rhodes has been held captive “for a long time.” Was the hospital gown he’s wearing when Rhodey is rescued a hint that the Skrulls kidnapped him after his spinal cord injury in “Captain America: Civil War?”

Yep.

What was it like working with Don on developing the deviations between Raava and “Rhodey” as he played them both?

A lot of that is Don Cheadle’s brilliant sense of logic, specificity and acting prowess.

The Raava thing was just simply, there was a point in the beginning where we were designing the Skrulls and we made the comment “Would a Skrull pick a human that had its facial features?” If I looked a little bit like this as a Skrull, why would I go into hiding and find a human like that looked kind of like me? So, we deviated from that and said, what we have to do is really show that, in a lot of instances, these people are hiding out in a human shell, and they’re going to pick a completely different race, a different age, and why not a different gender? Why couldn’t a female Skrull become a male [human]? And that’s where that came from — let’s just be smart about how they’re going into hiding.

From there, it was Don Cheadle [filling in] the details of what that would mean to him. He’s brilliant.

Do you have another MCU project you’d want to direct?

Honestly, I worked on the show for 28 months and right now I’m just thinking about lunch and maybe a bike ride or something like that. But I was deeply moved working with Olivia Colman and Emilia Clarke, and this thing that’s left dangling at the end of sixth [episode] is really inspiring to me. So, we’ll see where it goes.

This interview was edited and condensed.