New Captain Marvel clip sheds light on Annette Bening's mysterious role

With so many leaks, it’s often difficult for the Marvel movie gatekeepers to keep all their secrets tucked safely inside the Disney vault. Whether or not it’s because rumors had already been swirling about who exactly Annette Bening is playing in next month’s Captain Marvel, the actress was given clearance to talk about it with Stephen Colbert and showcase a new clip of her in action.

Bening is playing the Supreme Intelligence opposite Brie Larson as Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. It’s “a god-like entity,” the star of 20th Century Women and The Seagull explains. “The leader of the Kree people, the artificial intelligence which consists of the greatest intellects of the Kree people for the last million years.”

The Kree, of course, are an alien race seen previously in Guardians of the Galaxy. Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace) and Korath (Djimon Honsou) are two of them — and they also happen to have roles in Captain Marvel, which is set in the 1990s before the events of GOTG and even the first Iron Man.

In the comics, the Intelligence is a super computer. In the movie, it takes a more pleasing physical form of Bening in a Kree combat suit.

The clip Bening brought for Colbert’s crowd shows the Intelligence speaking with Carol inside the Kree’s virtual chamber. “She’s about to go into battle and I am preparing her,” Bening says. The Intelligence explains a little bit about their enemies, the Skrulls, to Carol. They are shapeshifters who infiltrate planets under the guise of its inhabitants and then secretly take over. “Secret” is one of those buzz words that references Secret Invasion, the popular Marvel Comics arc that saw the Skrulls infiltrating even the Avengers team.

Ben Mendelsohn portrays the leader of the Skrulls, Talos, in Captain Marvel, which also stars Jude Law, Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg, Lashana Lynch, and Gemma Chan.

Bening found all of this somewhat confusing, but “when the movie comes out [on March 8] it’ll be clear why it was somewhat confusing,” she explains. Luckily for her, she read the script to her two kids, who explained exactly what is going on.

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