The Season 1 finale of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD found things changing in many ways, as Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tasked Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) with starting SHIELD over again from the ground up, free of the corruption caused by Hydra – and named Coulson the new Director of the organization.
I spoke to Gregg about what this means for Coulson and for the actor playing him, plus what he feels about SHIELD’s new scheduling next season, where the show will air in two distinct halves; with Marvel’s Agent Carter airing in the same timeslot in its place in the middle of the season.
IGN TV: I feel like I should say, "Hello, Director Coulson."
Clark Gregg: I can't even say it! It's funny, you're the first person who's said it.
IGN: Oh, nice! Me and Nick Fury. [Laughs] What did you think when you found out that was where it was all gonna go in the finale?
Gregg: I'm a nerd. I grew up reading these comics. I was choked up. I was messed up all day by that scene -- and having it delivered by an amazing actor like Sam. It's all just kind of an amazing dream come true for me.
IGN: In general, in that finale, lots of big stuff happened. Sam [Jackson] being present, the final showdown...
Gregg: Finally showing up, saving Fitz and Simmons! Showing up and bringing my old friend, the Destroyer [gun]. That's pretty great.
IGN: Coulson's now rebuilding SHIELD. I was thinking about the fact that Fury has given him all this access to hidden bases and whatnot, but Fury's technically dead. Do you think that this new SHIELD will be a very much off-the-grid type of SHIELD, maybe not an officially sanctioned SHIELD?
Gregg: That's a really interesting point just because what's been clear to me is that the Agent Coulson who's running this team post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, post-Hydra, post-being killed and brought back to life with something in him he doesn't understand… He’s a very different Coulson than the guy who everyone knew. A lot of people who knew him in the old days say, "He's different." I think you would have to be different having gone through that stuff. So I think he's reinventing himself and re-understanding himself as a person anyway, which is probably really necessary to taking in the new environment and figuring out what SHIELD ought to be in a way that it doesn't get rotten again.
IGN: Now of course you mentioned the changes, and at the very end of the finale we saw that there's something going on still with him. Any idea what that might be and how worried we should be?
Gregg: Well, Coulson got to watch himself pre-memory wipe describing why he thought the whole Tahiti Project was a bad idea. He was talking about all the things that were happening to the people they were using on it and why he suggested they can the whole thing - and looked pretty shaken while he was saying it. So I've got to suspect that some of the stuff he saw and some of those patients have some version of the stuff that's going to happen to him. So we go from having no SHIELD at all, with a director on the run, to a tiny Guerrilla SHIELD with Agent Coulson at its head, and maybe not in his own right head. That sounds fun. That sounds like an interesting Season 2.
IGN: What do you think about splitting the season, as far as you're going to be running in the fall, then Agent Carter comes on and you take a break, and then you come back for the second half?
Gregg: I think it's a great idea. I think in the present age of TV, nobody wants to go down two weeks here, three weeks there. I don't like it. I don't think our fans liked it. It didn't let us keep the momentum going with the story. It's been amazing to watch how much the show clicked into gear, first of all, after the events of Winter Soldier, but when we got to run 10 episodes without a break. You can download the season of so many shows on Netflix in one day -- who wants to take a two-week pause? I don't!
Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: Season 2 debuts this fall on ABC.
