32 EW.COM SEPTEMBER 14, 2018
GEMMA CHAN
Minn-Erva
“Before Carol joined the
team, Minn-Erva was the
star of Starforce,” Chan
says of her elite Kree
sniper. “So she’s slightly
threatened by someone
else who has come in
and is also very talented.”we’re loud. People want us to have warning
stickers on us, like explicit lyrics.” Men-
delsohn plays both the slimy Skrull leader
and the buttoned-up human S.H.I.E.L.D.
boss he impersonates on Earth. He also
oversees a certain S.H.I.E.L.D. desk jockey,
who’s just beginning his intelligence career...Captain Marvel takes place in the
mid-’90s—long before Steve Rogers was
defrosted or Tony Stark built his first suit.
“It’s giving Carol a place in the cinematic
universe that she can carve out for her own,where she wasn’t one superheroine out of
many,” executive producer Jonathan
Schwartz says. Plus, the 1990s setting
allows for era-appropriate needle drops and
new introductions to familiar faces.
The film marks Samuel L. Jackson’s ninth
appearance as Nick Fury, but this younger
Nick isdifferent from the espionage expert
we’ve met before—so different that there
were times Jackson himself didn’t recognize
him. “I’ll read something, and I’ll read it as
present Nick Fury, and I’ll go, ‘He would
never do this,’” Jackson says. “And I go, ‘Oh,
wait a minute. He’s not in that place yet.’ ”The pointy-eared, wrinkly-chinned Skrulls may
be among Marvel’s most infamous villains,
but Ben Mendelsohn insists that we’ve all got
the wrong idea. “The Kree are punks. And
the Skrulls, we’re just misunderstood,”
Mendelsohn says. The green shape-shifters
made their comics debut in 1962, facing
of against the Fantastic Four; since then,
they’ve spent decades attempting to invade
Earth and feuding with the Kree, their
intergalactic nemeses. Mendelsohn stars in
Captain Marvel as Talos, a Skrull leader who
infiltrates S.H.I.E.L.D. As a human he uses
an American accent, but as a Skrull he reverts
to his native Australian. “Skrulls sound good,”
Mendelsohn explains. “Like, a Skrull sounds
tough but friendly, a little bit sexy, kind of
warm, but very not-to-be-messed-with-at-all.
So strangely enough, we’ve discovered that
Skrulls sound a lot like Australians.”JUDE LAW
Starforce commander
Law’s military leader is
Kree to the core—but
he has a soft spot for the
part-human Carol.
“He recognizes her as
very special and as a
great attribute to the
Kree warriors,” Law says.faces—Lee Pace’s Ronan and Djimon Houn-
sou’s Korath—will appear inCaptain Marvel.
(Some Kree are blue, like Ronan, and some
are not. They’re all still Kree.)
Starforce’s members include Korath;
sniper Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan); and its
commander, the enigmatic character
played by Law (filmmakers declined to
reveal his identity). “He is driven by a
belief in the divine leadership of the Kree
people,” Law explains. “So he’s almost a
devout warrior—unquestioning, conserva-
tive, but inspirational.”
He’s particularly close to Carol, who he
views as a mentee and pet project. “These
extraordinary powers she has, he sees them
as something of a blessing and something
that she has to learn how to control,” Law
says. “That’s a motif throughout the piece,
the element of learning to control one’s
emotions and to use your powers wisely.”
Those powers serve Carol well in her bat-
tle against the Kree’s biggest enemy: the
Skrulls. The bright green aliens are some
of Marvel Comics’ nastiest and most notori-
ous baddies, made all the more dangerous
by their shape-shifting abilities. Ben Men-
delsohn (who starred in Boden and Fleck’s
Mississippi Grind) plays their leader Talos,
who spearheads the Skrull invasion of
Earth. “We’re kind of like the thrash-metal
component of the Marvel Universe,” Men-
delsohn says. “We’re tough, we’re brash,
MEAN
AND
GREENMEET THE
CAPTAIN’S
CREW
CAPTAIN MARVEL: CHUCK ZLOTNICK/© MARVEL STUDIOS 2019; LAW,CHAN: MICHAEL MULLER/© MARVEL STUDIOS 2019 (2)