Wacky Things That Happened On Marvel Movie Sets

Marvel made the superheroes plus comedy combo a thing, which is one of the reasons why we can really get invested in ridiculous stories about purple scrotum-chinned bad guys, talking raccoons, and flying ladies with flaming mohawks. In fact weirdness in general just seems to permeate the whole Marvel movie-making process, both on camera and off.

Most of us aren't lucky enough to witness the movie-making process first hand. In fact, a lot of the stars of Marvel movies aren't allowed to witness most of the movie-making process first hand, either, because they can't be trusted with spoilers. So we have to wait until those stories come out in interviews with the cast and crew, or in blooper footage, or when Tom Holland accidentally says something he isn't supposed to say. Or, in an article like this one, which is surely only a taste of all the wacky and wonderful behind-the-scenes nonsense that Marvel stars get up to.

Pranking was evidently something that happened a lot on Marvel sets, and Anthony Mackie was behind a lot of it. In fact he told the crowd at MCM London Comic-Con that to relieve stress, he used to go down to the set of Ant-Man (which was filming down the street from Infinity War) specifically to torture Paul Rudd. "I just go and bully Paul Rudd for an hour and then come back to set. Everyone just feels better about themselves."

In fairness, though, it sounds like Rudd made himself a bit of a target just by being so good-natured. Other actors proved to be less vulnerable to Mackie's antics, though he did seem to get at least one decent shot at Tom Holland.

"I almost pushed Tom Holland in a lake," Mackie said. "But then he got so angry he almost jumped in the lake trying to push me in the lake. Which made it SO much better."

"I would prank Paul Rudd every day of the week," Mackie continued. "It's so easy man, he's an easy target. Tom [Holland] is always watching his six. He's always nervous. He knows something going down. But Paul is just happy, he's like lalalalala. So he's easy to get."

There was loads of fun to be had on the set of Avengers: Age of Ultron. On the blooper reel that came out just prior to the release of the Blu-ray and DVD, you can watch your favorite superheroes getting kind of friendly with each other, and we don't mean sitting down for a beer and chatting about Game of Thrones. On the blooper reel, Captain America can be seen leaning in for a kiss from Tony Stark, and Thor and The Vision can be seen in an all-out, swept-him-off-his feet, wind-blowing-in-his-cape romantic embrace slash kiss. In front of a green screen.

People love that stuff because it tells us that whatever relationship those characters have on screen, the actors have got a pretty great working relationship off screen. Director Joss Whedon once famously said that the cast got along too well, since he had actually been counting on a little on-set friction so he could turn it into some real on-screen drama. "I was like, well, if they hate each other, I guess we can use that," he told Entertainment Weekly. "But they don't."

One of the surprise stars in Captain Marvel was the cat who played Goose. (There were four cats who played Goose, but to keep it simple we'll just talk about one of them, Reggie.) Obviously, Reggie should have been the most highly paid actor in the whole film because of the fluffy adorableness and also the weird tentacle explosion thingy, but that's a debate for another time. What's especially noteworthy about Reggie's presence on set was the fact that Brie Larson is deathly allergic to cats.

"It was like the joke on set because I could do really crazy things stunt-wise," Larson told USA Today. "But the cat was a big obstacle for me. It's weird how you can train and get your body to do insane things but allergies are kind of a hard stop. That's where your body's like, 'That's it.'"

To compensate, the crew had to take special measures whenever Larson and Reggie were in the same scene. Larson's allergies were actually bad enough that they would sometimes use a fake cat as a Reggie stand-in, but if the scene required her to touch the cat, they'd have someone on hand to immediately wipe down her hands afterward. And Reggie would get booted off the set altogether if he wasn't needed for filming, which is just further evidence that the poor creature was pitifully underappreciated, and probably underpaid, too.

We're a long way from a world where sexism stays the hell out of our entertainment, even in superhero films that are supposedly about strong women with amazing abilities. This one's a little less laugh-wacky and a little more how-is-this-really-still-happening kind of wacky. According to CBR, Jessica Alba was so shaken by her experience playing invisible woman Sue Storm in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, that she nearly gave up acting. And it wasn't because she had trouble getting into character or because she didn't like the script — it was because Tim Story, the director, was kind of, um, let's say "given to 1950s ideas about female movie stars."

While filming a sequence where Sue Storm was supposed to cry, Story told Alba that her performance was "too real."

"'Can you be prettier when you cry?'" Alba recalled in an interview with Elle Magazine. "'Cry pretty, Jessica.' He was like, 'Don't do that thing with your face. Just make it flat. We can CGI the tears in.'"

After the experience, Alba said she started to question herself and her acting abilities. "Am I not good enough? Are my instincts and my emotions not good enough? Do people hate them so much that they don't want me to be a person? Am I not allowed to be a person in my work? And so I just said, "F*ck it. I don't care about this business anymore."

Fortunately, Alba shook it off and continued to work in Hollywood, so good for her.

Working with CGI co-stars is harder than it looks. For a start, you've got to pretend that dude wearing a bright green polka-dotted suit who's crawling around on all fours is not hilarious and is also a talking raccoon. In some cases, you even have to pretend to be talking to someone who's there when in fact no one is actually there. That's why for smaller CGI characters like Baby Groot, filmmakers will create stand-ins so the actors have something to talk to, even if it doesn't happen to be a living something.

"We had a statue of little Groot," director James Gunn said at a press event. "We just had this adorable little statue standing there, and we'd get in this scene and all this stuff would be going on and [the cast] would be acting their butts off, and really putting [in] their hearts and souls. All of a sudden Chris [Pratt] would look over at [Baby Groot] and go, 'Damn it, he's gonna steal the whole movie!"

In fact the tension between Pratt and Baby Groot perhaps even crossed the line into jealousy. "I'd say, 'Let's get a shot over here cuz I think Groot's going to be trying to get a bug while this scene is happening," Gunn said. "And [Pratt is] like, 'Really, Groot's going to be trying to get a bug while I'm crying about my father?" Out-cuted by a sapling.