Samuel L Jackson gets chatty about The Winter Soldier and his place in the story

With April fourth getting closer (every day it gets closer, strangely) Samuel L Jackson has been getting chatty with USA Today about his character, Nick Fury, in the fllow-up – his first appearance since The Avengers – and it seems there’s changes afoot, not just with SHIELD, but with Fury too.

“You see Nick Fury the office guy, him going about the day-to-day work of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the politics as opposed to that other stuff. It’s great to have him dealing with Captain America in terms of being able to speak to him soldier to soldier and try to explain to him how the world has changed in another way while he was frozen in time. Some of the people who used to be our enemies are now our allies — him trying to figure out, “Well, how do we trust those guys?” or “How do we trust the guys that you didn’t trust who don’t trust you? And explaining to him that the black and white of good guys/bad guys has now turned into this gray area. Nick lies to him all the time, too. But he’s trying to help him navigate the waters of the new sharks that he doesn’t know anything about.

He also confirms some of the details we knew about Robert Redford’s character – he is Fury’s boss – SPOILER but declined to add to Redford’s ambiguous comments earlier this year (here) that he’s a villain SPOILER ENDS and goes into a little detail about how Fury handles the ‘truth’: “There’s always stuff to deal with when I’m being Nick. Everything has another meaning with Nick. Finding the truth of what he’s saying in that particular moment is the important thing. Ultimately there’s a lie in there somewhere. Sometimes it’s a lie he’s been told that he hasn’t discovered, so I have to deal with that all the time. There’s also the nature of his relationship with different people. Like when he talks to Cap, he can talk to Cap in several different ways. He can talk to him as an equal in terms of they were both soldiers from a specific era, and you understand his kind of morality. He can also talk to him as a guy who’s part of a world he doesn’t know anything about, and he’s a mentor now to help him do something. And then I speak to him sometimes as a boss. There’s all those things I have to blend in to make sure he doesn’t get rankled or ruffled in a certain kind of way and make sure he understands.

And on his relationship with Black Widow: “And when I talk to Natasha, it’s as a father figure because he loves her in a way that he doesn’t love anybody else as part of that whole group of people. The fact that they’re both members of this shadow world and he knows her past in a way that no one else knows it, there’s an affection and a respect there and a knowledge of that kind of person she is in there. Even if she loves him, if she had to kill him, she would, and he understands that. There’s a way of dealing with her that he can’t deal with anybody else. There are all kinds of things that happen. When I’m dealing with the world council, I’ve got a whole other attitude. And when I look in the mirror, I have to deal with what kind of patriot am I? There’s Nick dealing with Nick, and how many lies have I told? Have I told so many lies that I don’t really know what’s the truth anymore?”

As a side note, Marvel Studios has released the official synopsis of The Winter soldier:

After the cataclysmic events in New York with The Avengers, Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier finds Steve Rogers – aka Captain America – living quietly in Washington, DC, and trying to adjust to the modern world. But when a S.H.I.E.L.D. colleague comes under attack, Steve becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that threatens to put the world at risk. Joining forces with the Black Widow, Captain America struggles to expose the ever-widening conspiracy while fighting off professional assassins sent to silence him at every turn. When the full scope of the villainous plot is revealed, Captain America and the Black Widow enlist the help of a new ally, the Falcon. However, they soon find themselves up against an unexpected and formidable enemy – the Winter Soldier.