During a panel at Terrificon 2024, Cobie Smulders said she was unaware of Maria Hill’s twist during ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ filming.
“I wasn’t really me. I didn’t know that until the end until we had finished shooting,” the actress revealed. “[Marvel Studios] let me know. They were like, ‘Just so you know, we were gonna do this thing.'”
Although she was a Skrull pretending to be Maria Hill, Smulders added, “They wanted me to play it [normally]. Even if I knew the whole time, I think we still would be playing the reality of the day-to-day.”
Screenwriter Chris McKenna, who worked with Erik Sommers, said in 2019 that an early movie version connected the master of illusions to the shape-shifting Skrulls.
“There was a very, very early iteration of the Mysterio story that actually did involve the Skrulls that we kicked to the curb early in the story-writing process,” McKenna shared with Variety.
He continued, “Because this really became a con artist movie, essentially, we really went along with how many ways can we deceive the audience? How many twists and turns can we have?”
“It seemed like it was an idea that [director] Jon Watts had kicked around early on that we embraced as something people would love to have,” McKenna added. “There’s always one final twist, and we would be living up to what we were trying to emulate and celebrate.”
The mid- and end-credit scenes of ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ shocked fans and sparked many theories. The final scenes showed that Nick Fury and Maria Hill had been Skrulls the whole time. Some fans even thought Hill might have been a Skrull since her first appearance in 2012’s ‘The Avengers.’
“Literally a week before the movie came out, I found out from Kevin [Feige] that they shot the extra scene [with Maria and Nick],” Smulders told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. “It was added [during postproduction]. That driving footage is from the first scene that got cut out of the movie.”
When asked if Maria Hill has been a Skrull since The Avengers, Smulders also said she doesn’t think so. She hopes Hill is just on vacation or another mission.