This last weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, the Marvel Report was invited to a press event where we had the opportunity to sit and talk with some of the cast members of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD at SDCC, including Ming-Na Wen and Iain De Caestecker.
Ming and Iain shared their thoughts on where the season would be headed with the introduction of Ghost Rider as well as some interesting thoughts on potential romances on screen this season.
The video and transcript below contains language and content that may be offensive. Please be advised.
Both of your characters really had some emotional arcs last season, are we gonna see more of that next season or have you guys been kinda put through the ringer?
Iain: We were just saying – any period of happiness is followed quickly by a period of tragedy, right? You can expect it. That’s kind of the nature of dramas.
Ming: Who wants to see happy people for 45 minutes?
Iain: Yeah, f*** that! Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a whole episode of us on the beach sunbathing with our headphones in? So, I presume there will be more ups and downs.
Ming: I think in a way, there’s a fresh start in the sense that we did defeat Hydra and Hive. So I think there might be a sense of relief and uplift for a moment – for a second, and maybe a chance to rebuild and maybe learn from our mistakes and wait for the new wave of evil people to pursue us.
Will we see more romance between Fitz and Jemma as well as May and Coulson going forward?
Ming: Everybody wants that! They want the Philinda thing! I think Philinda would be a great moonlighting thing, you know?
Iain: Also he’s got the robot hand now, maybe with a couple special features. Ming is the queen of double entendres and things.
Ming: I am as pure as this white dress. I am a mother of two children. There’s nothing about me that is naughty. At all. But hell, Coulson’s hand, man. You know, he does take it off every now and then.
Do you think after everything that May experienced this last season, that she would be willing to take on the mantle of director?
Ming: That question gets asked, and my answer to that is it is a surprising question only because May has always been so reticent about even coming back to SHIELD after her experience in Bahrain. I think for her, it would be very interesting choice to make.
She’s arguably the most capable.
Ming: She’s capable. It’s whether she wants to or not.
Aside from being killed off, what’s the worst thing for you that could happen to your characters?
Iain: I suppose that something would happen to Simmons would be the worst thing. That would suck.
Ming: Last season was so tough on us as actors because we get so close as a family and to lose some of our family members like Brett and Luke, even in the past seasons, it’s very traumatic for us when we do certain scenes, it’s mixed on with real emotions. Selfishly, after having done 33, I never hope my character ends up being disfigured and I have to always go into prosthetics and make up every time I have to be in front of the camera.
How will we see May adjust to life without Andrew?
Ming: I think she just buries it. She’s every capable of not coping with those traumas and even in the instance of being there with him and seeing his dead body, she just shuts it all down. She might kill more people, though.
After last season, are we seeing some of the agents going back to their season one characters – is May gonna close off and go back to their safe place again?
Ming: Possibly – it’s so difficult to answer those questions because we might want our characters to go one way or another and we really have no control over it. We’re basically pawns that move around and it’s our amazing writers. I wouldn’t want their job, they do an incredible job of figuring out how to jigsaw all those story lines together and make our characters do things that we normally wouldn’t even think that they would do.
(Ming then looks to Iain)
Ming: Like, me and you. Dating. Having little babies.
(Iain makes gagging gestures)
Ming: I am trying so hard to torture him!
Iain: I’m with Elizabeth all the time which is just the best, they could’ve eased me into Ming, you know?
Ming: WOW. Did you just say that? Did you really just say that? Did you just freakin’ say that in front of me?
(Iain turns beet red)
Ming: Let’s end it on that note!
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD returns on September 20 at 10pm on ABC.