I'd be just another Marvel fan, only with a little bit bigger smile, when I would get the script and be like, "Oh, my gosh, Agent Coulson knows that?

As you can imagine when you have to summon a force like that together, the opposing elements are pretty freaking gnarly. I would think of those pioneer movies where they've got the cook and the ladies loading the guns and firing at the surrounded wagons. I don't put Coulson in that category, I think he is on the upper tier of people who come to scrap at situations like that but everybody's involved.

I'm not secretly on the board of Marvel.

The tremendous Jeremy Latcham from Marvel showed up with this one-of-a-kind animated encyclopedia about S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Avengers. Coulson wasn't a part of the comic books, which is a singular thing about him that I thought would get me killed off very quickly, but luckily, it didn't. It just became a thing that I fit into, and they kept finding new and better uses for me.

There's a different set of writers and a different director for the films, but Marvel has turned it into a pretty spectacular job.

No matter how tight the shot is, if I'm narrating it too much, there's a barrier between you and the experience, because the process of reading a book, or watching a movie, or watching a play is that you're watching a dream.

I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.