We talked to Brett Dalton who plays Grant Ward on ABC’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (Tuesdays at 8pm ET) about how he feels about the show’s fans, social media and the Marvel universe.
A lot of critics and fans share the opinion that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. started off slowly when it debuted, only reaching its stride following your recent crossover with Captain America: The Winter Soldier — a film that essentially transformed S.H.I.E.L.D. from an above-board government organization into on-the-run renegade underdogs. Do you think that there was a conscious redirection at any point for this show or was the recent creative shift planned all along?
Brett Dalton: I mean, I hear things through the grapevine that are above my pay grade, but I will say that Marvel picked up a show about S.H.I.E.L.D. knowing that halfway through our run, there was also a movie that they made called Captain America, which would completely change that organization and the world in which that organization lives and operates. They knew what they were doing, and I think that even before the Captain America tie-in, the show became darker. They were actually using machine guns now, there were actually people dying, it wasn’t just shooting with the “icers” and incapacitating them and then they were gone. The show did become a little bit darker and so there is a shift happening. I don’t know why. I feel like we’ve always been told that it takes a while for a show to find itself; we didn’t even find out we had a full season run until three episodes in. I think the show actually really has found itself. It started out with one foot in the world of The Avengers, which Josh created … a kind of tongue-in-cheek sort of a thing. But here we are now and it definitely has changed a little bit. Obviously it’s still funny, but the world itself has changed. That organization, which they thought was just a sterling organization filled with good guys doing good things, we find out that maybe that’s not exactly what it was. Maybe it’s a lot more complicated that that, maybe there’s a whole ’nother thing. Maybe the people we thought we knew were actually bad all along.
One of the things that many viewers love right now, even before the big change and the big revelation, is the semi-regular appearance of Bill Paxton on the show. As someone who gets to share many a scene with Agent Garrett, what does he bring to the show?
Brett: God, I love the guy. I mean that’s what I feel … I don’t even know where to begin. I love the guy so much. He plays my supervising officer, and he took me under his wing, and there’s this whole backstory as to why he is so important to me. Bill is one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met, and in real life took me under his wing and really became a mentor. I just have nothing but good things to say about the guy. I feel like I can spend the rest of the time of this interview just talking about him. He’s just so cool and so appreciative. He brings something to the table that is essential to our show. He’s the central baddie that we’ve all been talking about, this “clairvoyant” that we’ve been waiting to meet all season. This is the bad guy. Our show needs that; our first couple were one-off characters who were kind of enemies, but we didn’t have a real big baddie and he is the guy who has been pulling strings against us this entire time. Actually, like me, his character was trying to be somebody else and then as soon as he got to reveal what he really is underneath, it’s so much cooler and darker. There’s almost a “Joker”-like flavor to his character where he really loves his job and he loves being bad, just as Coulson loves being good. He brings something. It’s essential to have him there. It’s essential to have a force against S.H.I.E.L.D. that has a face. And that face is Bill Paxton, and Bill Paxton loves his job. He’s so good.
The whole cast of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” has been incredibly interactive with fans, often tweeting along with them while the show is airing. How does this barrage of feedback affect your approach to your job?
Brett: I’ve been told from the very beginning you’ve got to be really be careful with what critiques you read or what news you read, because you don’t remember any of the positive things. You just remember that one bad thing that somebody said, or even something they said offhandedly when they didn’t actually mean for it to hurt. I’ve always been very careful with that kind of stuff. Generally, if they’re following you on Twitter, they’re not haters. If they’re following you on Twitter, and they’re following the show and having that experience with us watching the show as well, so it’s all generally positive. Generally people are positive and watch the show very closely and are really right there with us, experiencing the twists and turns in a way that we did when we first read the script. That’s really cool to see.
How familiar were you with the Marvel Universe — the characters, comics and films — before you got the nod to join Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.?
Brett: Well, I’ve always been interested in comic books. I still have my collection from when I was a kid, and gosh, I had all the plastics and the cardboard and I made my room into a small little display case. I’d hang up all my comics, the best ones. I still have a shelf that has some action figures there. I still have whole collections of action figures. I was pretty serious about it and then I discovered girls or something like that, I don’t know. Other things became more important around high school and then when I went to grad school, every once in a while I’d duck into a comic shop. I think it’s one of those things where you have to stay current. You have to be aware of all the stuff that’s out there and if you not in it for a while, it does take a while to catch up. It’s like there’s so many different storylines, and there’s so many different things that if you’re not constantly looking at it, then you can feel like, “Wow, a lot has happened since I was back in the comic shop.” We have this great excuse now because we’re part of the show. They gave us stacks of comic books when we first started, just for us to look at. It’s cool, like a dream come true to actually be a part of that universe that I’d only read about. I never in a million years thought I would ever be a part of it. We don’t have super powers — that’s the other thing, too. We are a part of it, but we are the faces of what up until now has been kind of a faceless organization. It works in the background and helps manage things and keeps the evil powers out of the wrong hands and all of that stuff. We were just the guys in the background wearing all black and that stuff. But here we are now, having our own show, and we really have our own characters and cool plot twists.
Read Part 2 of our interview with Brett Dalton of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.EL.D.