Actor Teyonah Parris, who played Monica Rambeau in The Marvels, says she didn’t know who else was in her post-credits scene until after the film came out.
NB: The following contains spoilers for The Marvels’ post-credits scene if you haven’t seen it yet.
Increasingly, Marvel movies have begun to resemble a patchwork quilt of live-action performances and CGI elements, with backgrounds, costumes and even entire characters added long after cameras have stopped rolling.
Case in point: The Marvels’ post-credits sequence, in which Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau wakes up in an alternate reality in which her mother is still alive. Oh, and also, the X-Men as we knew them from the 2000s films exist here.
Parris’ reaction when she’s unexpectedly reunited with her mother is emotional stuff, as you’d expect from an actor of her calibre.
In a fascinating insight into how Marvel Studios makes movies, though, Parris has revealed that she performed the scene without knowing that Kelsey Grammer’s Beast was going to be in it alongside her. In fact, she didn’t know of Beast’s existence in the scene until after the movie came out.
“I enjoyed the live experience, in the shock and the surprise,” Parris told TheWrap. “But also, I’m like, guys, don’t you think my reaction would have been a little different had I known it’s not a human, it’s a beast? It’s someone – in this universe, do I know him from somewhere else? Is this shocking?”
Although she sounds keen not to rock the boat too much, Parris expresses a certain amount of alarm that she wasn’t given any direction for her performance – and that had she known that her character had woken up to see, you know, a gigantic guy covered in blue fur, then her reaction may have been somewhat different.
“The actor in me was like, I would have liked – and the Type A in me – would have liked to process that differently,” Parris said. “But ultimately, people are not worried about my reaction to that.”
Read more: The Marvels review | Promising sequel gets bogged down in MCU lore
For balance, Parris then added that not knowing about Beast’s presence may have ultimately helped the scene:
“It’s probably best that I didn’t know, because then I would have tried to play like, (gasp) ‘Surprise, my mom! Surprise, a blue man!’ Like, it could have just been all over the place. So it’s probably for the best.”
It’s a diplomatic and classy reading of the situation on Parris’ part. But it’s a wonder whether she’s touched on a deeper problem for some of Marvel’s more recent output: that audiences can also tell, even subconsciously, when a film’s actors are constantly reacting to things or characters that don’t exist on-set. The performance equivalent of the uncanny valley.
Grammer’s all-CGI cameo as Beast is thought to pave the way for another cameo – or perhaps a bigger role – in the upcoming Deadpool And Wolverine, a film which is said to be stuffed with returning faces from X-Men films past. Here’s hoping at least a few of them actually get to share the same physical space together.
