It was cool to me, as a fan of the comics, to see some of the villains that end up finding them there, and the way that they abuse Coulson before the superheroes come. I'm always, in the movies or in the animated series, getting into trouble that a superhero has to bail me out of.

With the tone of the show, like a lot of the films, the Marvel creative team has found a way to bridge really exciting stuff that has real stakes. They balance some of the action stuff that the fans of the comics really want to see with characters that people can relate to and who are very human.

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.

Speaking as Coulson, it's unclear. I feel like that are other formidable S.H.I.E.L.D. elements and they don't have Coulson's connection to some of these people. I think what I like about what seems to be going on is there are differing opinions about who's where on the hierarchy and I think that's some of what goes on in the movie.

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.

You can never discount the pleasure of showing up to work with Scarlett Johansson and now Cobie Smulders. That's just a day that's easy on your eyes.

It's a little strange, after all these years of working on camera, but once you start to watch the other people who do this a lot and realize how much of what you're doing has to just come through your voice, I found it really interesting.