Marvel Studios has been notoriously secretive when it comes to the details of Avengers: Endgame, and that applies not only to what they hide from the public, but also what they hide from their own cast members.
For example, during the filming of last year’s Avengers: Infinity War, actors were given fake screenplays to avoid spoilers leaking. And even when the stars were shown genuine scripts, they were often only allowed to know about the scenes that directly involved their characters. These measures carried over into next week’s sequel, and in a recent interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Joe Russo admitted that possibly only one cast member was allowed to see the complete scripts.
“[Robert Downey Jr.] was probably the only one to actually read the entire script,” Russo said. “I think Benedict [Cumberbatch] got the script that included his scenes only. [Chris] Evans might have read the whole script.”
Well, if you’re only going to give that privilege to one or two actors, it’s only right that it would be the pair playing Iron Man and Captain America, who are looking to be the two main players in Marvel’s Phase 3 finale.
But why didn’t anyone else to get to see the full Infinity War and Endgame scripts? Do the Russo Brothers not trust their actors? Well, given the spoiler-heavy histories of stars like Mark Ruffalo and Tom Holland, you probably couldn’t blame them if that were the case, but instead, Anthony Russo offered a more charitable explanation.
“Part of our motivation to do that is it just takes a lot of pressure off of people,” Anthony Russo shared. “I mean, it is hard to constantly censor yourself about what you’re saying, how you talk, because these movies are your whole life. It’s everything you’re doing all day long, the inclination is to talk about it. So we take a lot of pressure off of people just by saying, ‘Okay, the less you know, the less you have to mind yourself.’”
The approach proved well-suited to Infinity War, in which Earth’s Mightiest Heroes were scattered across different corners of the MCU. The lack of communication between heroes meant that the actors only needed to understand what was happening in their particular plot thread.
“[Chris] Hemsworth’s character, Thor, doesn’t need to know what Captain America’s doing for most of Infinity War, so Hemsworth reads his scenes and Evans reads his scenes, so if they don’t read the rest of the movie, they don’t know what’s going on with it, and it makes it easier to have conversations with people,” Joe said. “We kept it going through, even more so, with Endgame. There are more secrets in Endgame than there are in Infinity War.”
For the most part, Marvel Studios has done a pretty exceptional job at keeping those secrets under wraps – the recent leak notwithstanding – but all will be revealed when Avengers: Endgame hits theaters on April 26th.