After years of hearing the various stars of the Marvel Cinematic Universe joke about Kevin Feige having snipers on the roof, not to mention Secret Invasion‘s Kingsley Ben-Adir revealing the studio trains its actors on how to not give away spoilers, Kevin Smith confirmed that the Marvel secret police are a real thing.
The filmmaker, podcaster, and all-round comic book nut claimed that people within the company often leave false information lying around in the hopes that someone will distribute it, instantly outing themselves as a traitor and no doubt facing a serious reprimand.
That even extends to the sprawling ensemble of Eternals, as revealed by Lauren Ridoff in a new interview with Elle. Despite making history as the franchise’s first deaf superhero, she confirmed the intense levels of secrecy that came with something as innocuous as reading a few pages of the screenplay.
“Marvel had a man in a trench coat who’d come over to my house at night with new script pages in a manila envelope for Eternals. You had to trade them off with the old script pages. Then he’d just walk off into the night.”
Of course, the MCU loves to keep as many surprises as possible under wraps for as long as it can, but having the men in black show up to your door to ensure that you don’t hold onto the actual script for the project you’re working on seems a bit much. The approach clearly works, though, because we don’t know a great deal about the ins and outs of Eternals, which comes to theaters in less than three weeks.