Marvel has been really amazing at maintaining secrecy around Avengers: Endgame as they have done everything one can possibly can to keep things shush. Actually, they’ve gone beyond what people could have thought. First of all, they have been marketing the movie with footage just from the first half of the movie. No other film has done that successfully. But the best part about the film is that even the actors are not sure what’s really going to happen in the film.
They started off by giving away fake scripts to certain actors. People like Tom Holland and Mark Ruffalo were actually given no scripts as they were only given their lines, that too at the set or a few days prior. Actors who did want to read the scripts from the start to beginning were put in a van in order to read them in one go. Even after this, there was still no guarantee whether the script was real or not.
Poor ol’ Paul Bettany who’s dyslexic spent 12-14 hours of a day reading two scripts which were actually fake! Only the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr. and probably Evans & Hemsworth got the full real scripts, just because the characters they were playing mostly needed to know about the other characters and their arcs.
If you thought that this was it, then wait till you know what happened on set. The Russos actually shot multiple endings with multiple characters. Mark Ruffalo has given us a new piece of info upon this, as he actually shot an ending where Captain America gets married. Here’s what he told E! sitting along with Chris Evans and Karen Gillan (Nebula):
“I shot, like, five different endings to this movie. I didn’t even get a whole script of this movie. I don’t know why. The script I did get had dummy scenes in it. He [pointing to Chris Evans] gets married in this!”
So the actors obviously don’t have a clue as to what really happens in the movie. A large credit for this goes to the way the film was shot as the Russos shot these two films almost back to back for 8 months. The tricky part about that is that they shot scenes back and forth from both the films. Some scenes that take place in Avengers: Endgame were actually shot in the beginning of the shooting days. That is why Paul Rudd and Jeremy Renner initially thought that they will be in Avengers: Infinity War. As it turned out, the only thing that was in the film was their character names.
Now Chris Hemsworth having appeared on The Ellen Degeneres show also talked about the insane things that happened on set. Now the funny thing is that he actually doesn’t know the final fate of Thor, he said:
“We’ve been doing the press tour and everyone’s like, ‘Tell us about the movie,’ and we’re like, ‘We can’t.’ Can’t tell you anything. It’s funny, I feel like a fan of this whole thing as much as anyone else, and I’m interested to see if I live or die or what happens to me [laughs]. I have a rough idea of what happens, but no, I have not seen the film and I really do not know how it ends.
We shot number three and number four, Infinity War and [Endgame], over eight months and back and forth from both films and overlapping … and it was being written while we were shooting and the other one was being edited and so on. During it, ‘Okay, what am I saying today, this is cool,’ and I trust the directors have us in the right place. I mean, this is, what, 22 films now across 10, 11 years? I don’t think there’s anything in cinematic history that’s ever been building to a film like this.”
So yea, the actors do have a rough idea of what’s going to happen, but not everyone would know the reality of it. Hemsworth obviously doesn’t know about his future, but he certainly wants to continue. He said:
“This is sort of Marvel’s Phase Three wrapping up and culmination of all this journey, whether or not they go off and shoot other things — prequels or sequels or whatever they can do — I mean Loki (Tom Hiddleston), my brother, has come back nine times, every time he dies he just keeps appearing. So who knows what’s in store for anyone. Me personally, it’s the best fun I’ve ever had, and I’d be happy to do more if they wanted me. More than happy.”
Avengers: Endgame comes out on April 26.
