Picture the scene: you’re an actor (or actress!), who turns up to set bright and early one day 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 all the scenes written down on your dummy script, which is 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 a recent interview. They were joined by Joe and Anthony Russo, the creative minds/gatekeepers behind Avengers: Infinity War, who revealed that Tom Holland is mostly to blame for Marvel’s strict no spoiler policy.
And while we know that most of the cast members were left in the dark as to all the juicy plot details, surely the Godfather of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Robert Downey Jr., was in on all the secrets, right? Well, apparently not. The actor recently told us that even he hasn’t seen a full script and, get this, doesn’t even know how the film ends. Speaking at a recent press event in Singapore, Downey Jr. said: “Marvel hasn’t even told me what the end of this movie is.”
While it’s believable that RDJ may not have received the complete script, we’re not sure if he’s being honest here when he says that he doesn’t know how Infinity War ends. I mean, he must have at least some idea of how things conclude. After all, Iron Man is surely in the last few scenes and even if he isn’t, going into Avengers 4, the actor would need to know how things wrapped up in the film.
Then again, who knows? Perhaps they shot different endings? Or maybe Tony isn’t involved in the conclusion for whatever reason? Either way, this is far from the first time we’ve heard about how the directors withheld the script from the cast and just a few days ago, the Russos mentioned that a lot of the actors got fake pages.
“We can divulge nothing at this point. We worked really hard to protect the secrets of the movie because this is the end of 10 years of storytelling and I think a lot of people [have] emotionally invested quite a bit into the Marvel Universe so we want to make sure they have the best experience they can have when they go in to see the movie.”
“We wrote fake pages for the script, we distributed fake pages. None of the actors have actually read the entire script, the real script. Very few people actually know what’s going to happen in the movie.”
We’ll get to see for ourselves if all this secrecy and trickery paid off in a week, as Avengers: Infinity War opens on April 27th and will be smashing through more than a few box office records when it does.