Picture the scene: you’re an actor (and a pretty good one at that), who turns up to set bright and early only to realize that all of the lines you’ve memorized – all of the little nuances that make up your character – are fake. As are the scenes written down on your dummy script that’s about to be shredded in the name of secrecy.
Such is the day-to-day life of an Avenger, as Elizabeth Olsen (Scarlet Witch) and Paul Bettany (Vision) told GamesRadar in recent interview. They were joined by Joe and Anthony Russo, the creative minds/gatekeepers behind Avengers: Infinity War, who joked that Tom Holland is partly to blame for Marvel’s strict no spoiler policy.
That’s not to say that Marvel Studios didn’t enforce NDAs and precautions prior to Infinity War – far from it, in fact. It’s just that after Holland’s cheeky, untimely leaks, the Powers That Be “shut everything down” and began handing out fake scripts to the primary cast members, as Joe Russo recalled:
It’s important that all that time and energy that people have spent investing in the Marvel Universe over the last decade, all the passion and emotion, all the conversations that they’ve had online, we don’t want the ending spoiled.
Continuing on, Joe then joked that Tom Holland can’t be trusted with precious, spoiler-sensitive information about Infinity War and its top-secret story.
We put a lot of effort into making sure nobody knows the true story of the film. All the actors were given fake scripts… very few people have seen the actual film itself. We can’t trust anybody – least of all Tom Holland! It’s a burden to bear for them. It’s probably easier to have read a fake script and a fake ending because they don’t have the pressure of knowing what happens in the movie and then they have to hide it.
And viewers will begin to lay eyes on the end product once Avengers: Infinity War begins its global rollout on April 25th, before making its way into U.S. theaters on Friday, April 27th.