Clark Gregg calls his new Agents of SHIELD character ‘disturbing’

Clark Gregg may not be playing Phil Coulson anymore, but he’s teasing his new  Agents of SHIELD role, which he believes is vastly different.

Phil Coulson is dead, but Clark Gregg will still have a presence on Agents of SHIELD through a brand new role. Details on the character’s exact identity are still unknown, but Gregg has now provided a few more details on what fans can expect.

Gregg explained to Entertainment Tonight that the show’s creative team was put in a tough spot, after they decided to kill of Coulson (again). This decision was mostly made because they believed the show would be cancelled:

"“We had this really wonderful end of season five — the [season finale] episode was even called ‘The End’ — and we had reason to believe that we were done…and then they called everyone up and said, we’re actually gonna do two more short, 13-episode seasons, which is really the number we thought we always could do best at.”"

As a result, the actor was unsure if he would be brought back to the series, but he knew that if he was, he wanted a role that greatly differed from Coulson:

"“I didn’t know if it was going to involve me. And if it was going to involve me, I thought it had to be something special, something very different. I didn’t want to just kind of like, go, ‘Oh, never mind, it turns out he was OK all along.’”"

Luckily, the producers were able to give him that very thing, and while Gregg couldn’t be happier with the role, he does think it could be “disturbing” in some ways:

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"“What [producers] Jed and Mo Whedon and Jeff Bell came up with, with the other writers, fulfilled all those criteria. And I’m really excited for people to see what they came up with. It may be a little disturbing, but this is a very different person.”"

Of course, the question of the character’s actual identity still remains, and Gregg is spilling the beans. He did, however, possibly spoil that the character is somewhat surprised the SHIELD team find him familiar:

"“There’s a big mystery here. And I think that this person is as surprised as they are, that they seem to recognize his face… I probably wasn’t supposed to say that.”"

Agents of SHIELD began with Clark Gregg, and whether Phil Coulson is around or not, it’ll likely end with him, which is something the producers undoubtedly know. So it’s good to see they’ve found a way to keep him on the show going forward.

Based on the teaser, this new character appears to be a villain, who may be leading the mercenaries the team will face. This should make things very interesting for the team. It may not be easy for them to take down someone who so closely resembles their recently deceased boss. And will the character use this against them? All will be revealed when Agents of SHIELD returns to ABC this summer.