How Samuel L. Jackson Helped Marvel’s ‘Secret Invasion’ Explore Nick Fury’s Identity as a Black Man

SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses plot developments in Episode 2 of Marvel Studios Secret Invasion, currently streaming on Disney+.

Samuel L. Jackson has played the super spy Nick Fury in 11 movies for Marvel Studios. Sometimes, hes appeared in only a brief cameo; other times, hes been the second or third lead in a movie with Captain in the title. In every appearance, Jackson exudes preternatural calm and cunning as one of the most formidable, non-superpowered humans in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it wasnt until the actors first foray as the lead in an MCU project the Disney+ series Secret Invasionthat Marvel has really addressed the fact that Nick Fury is also a Black man who grew up in America.

We very seldom deal with Nick Fury in that way, Jackson says.

In Secret Invasion, Fury is at the ebb of his authority. Rattled by the Blip, hed decamped to a space station orbiting Earth, but he gets pulled back home by his friend Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), one of the shapeshifting Skrulls Fury helped to save in Captain Marvel, to stop a separatist sect of Skrulls led by the fanatical Gravik (Kingsley Ben-Adir). In the June 21 premiere episode, Fury and Talos fail to stop Gravik from bombing a public square Moscow.

In Episode 2, Fury demands a meeting with James Rhodey Rhodes (Don Cheadle), the Air Force colonel and former Avenger who fought alongside Fury as War Machine. Furys surprised to discover that not only does Rhodes already know about the Skrull threat, he rebukes Furys request for support to stop it. So Fury tries to evoke their common experience as Black men inside the halls of power including Furys experience unwittingly working for secret Hydra agent Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) from Captain America: The Winter Solider.

Men who look like us dont get promoted because of who our daddies know, Fury tells Rhodes. Every ounce of power that we wrestle from the vice grip of the mediocre Alexander Pierces who run this world was earned in blood. So lets make the power mean something. Help a brother out.

For Jackson, the scene was a chance to unpack how Fury and Rhodes have faced the world in a way hes never gotten to do in Marvels movies. Jackson says he talked with the shows writers about what its like for Fury to have that much power as a Black man, and how they can be diminished at any moment by someone else just saying a specific thing or changing the trajectory of ones career path because of it.

Rhodey and Fury have risen to this place where we have a certain amount of power, even though were better than the people who have power, we still got to suppress ourselves in a specific way, Jackson continues. And Marvels not afraid to let us explore that.

That exploration eventually became even more personal for Jackson. Earlier in Episode 2, Fury and Talos escape Moscow on a train, and Fury begins talking about his experience as a kid riding with his mother on the train to Detroit from his home in Alabama, when theyd have to bring their meals in a shoebox because we couldnt go in the dining car.

Filmmaker Ali Selim (The Looming Tower), who directed every episode of Secret Invasion, says that the story came directly from Jackson. It wasnt on the page. It was him telling us a story, he says. Hes very connected to Nick Fury in a way that no writer ever could be.

I used to take the train every summer from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Washington, D.C., Jackson says. I couldnt go in a dining car because its segregated. When they put me on the train, they gave me a shoebox with food in it, then I ate that food. We used things that were real for me as a person to give Nick Fury the kind of history that he has, to inform the story in a real way about, you know, how he wasnt always this [powerful], or he does look at America in another kind of way.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Gravik in Secret Invasion. Gareth Gatrell / Courtesy of Marvel Studios The effort has made Secret Invasion unusually trenchant for a Marvel project; along with the Black Panther films, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Ms. Marvel, its one of the few to directly address topics of racial identity in America. After Fury tells Talos about his childhood train rides, Talos confesses that over a million Skrull refugees have been secretly living on Earth for years, a revelation that shocks Fury. Humans cant coexist with each other, Talos! he bellows. There is not enough room or tolerance on this planet for another species!

Its the same problem we have right now, Jackson says, referencing the geopolitical tensions caused by influxes of human immigrants and refugees on our planet. How do you let all those people cross the border, not to mention how people will react? I mean, they dont like, brown [and] Black people. What do you think youre gonna do with some green people?

Selim whose mother is white and from Minnesota and father is Arab and from Egypt also sees a broader meaning in Furys struggle on the show. Ive lived in the Arab world. Ive lived in the Midwest. I always feel a little bit other, he says. I think at the core of Nick Furys journey as a Black man in America, the more universal sense of that is a story about the other: the other thats in himself, the other he feels in society.

That metaphor can only go so far on a comic book show, however. Ben-Adir says he had hours and hours of conversations with the shows producers about Gravik who we learn met Fury in the late 1990s as a child and what is driving his campaign for Skrull independence on Earth.

He trusts no one, loves no one, cares about no one, and is living solely to see Nick Fury and Talos experience as much of the pain that he felt as possible, Ben-Adir says. Hes playing with them in a way that kind of feels sociopathic, to say the least.

So Ben-Adir decided to lean into that, playing Gravik as a sociopath driven utterly by revenge, rather than a freedom fighter striving for the greater good of his people. The latter, Ben-Adir says, means nothing to him its just a way to manipulate people around him so he can do what he needs to do to make [Fury and Talos] feel the pain.

It is perhaps a surprising choice for the actor, given the appeal of playing a character whose core beliefs are righteous even if his means arent. But that approach did not appeal to Ben-Adir, who wanted to avoid drawing too clear of a line between the sci-fi conceits of Secret Invasion and the very real and complicated realities of refugees in the real world. I was like, we do not have the time to explore this properly in the show, he says. We need to be careful. The messaging of it, especially being a person of color I thought it was very risky.