The Falcon and the Winter Soldier team teases Julia Louis-Dreyfus role as 'a darker Nick Fury'

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the fifth episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Marvel is opening up about the bombshell cameo that arrived in the penultimate episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Comedy great Julia Louis-Dreyfus made her Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in the Disney+ series as Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine — or just Val, as she told Wyatt Russell's John Walker. But also, don't call her Val. Just keep it in your head, as the joke goes.

According to Marvel Studios producer Nate Moore, who spoke with Marvel.com about the big unveiling, Val is like the anti-Nick Fury, who's played by Samuel L. Jackson.

"Whenever we talked about Valentina, even in the writer's room, she was sort of a more acerbic, funnier, but darker Nick Fury," he said. "Someone who knows her secrets, who's not afraid to operate in the moral gray area, but maybe who isn't as inherently altruistic."

While it's currently unclear what the extent of her role in the larger MCU is, Moore further teased that this isn't the last we've seen of her.

"Having a character like Valentina in the show, and actually in the MCU, is really interesting because I think she'll be making more waves sooner rather than later," he added.

Val arrived on the scene to speak with John after the government stripped him of his Captain America rank and gave him an "other than honorable discharge" for publicly killing a member of the Flag-Smashers. With a purple streak in her hair, she tells him that, because he took the super-soldier serum, he's now someone of importance to "certain people." She implores him, in her own way, to pick up the phone when she calls him in the future and hands him a seemingly blank card — one side is black, one side is white.

On Monday, days after the episode dropped on Disney+, Dreyfus tweeted a photo of herself holding the card, only this time it has her character name on it.

"Yup," she wrote.

Zoie Nagelhout, another executive producer who was instrumental in shaping The Falcon and the Winter Soldier with Moore, said that meeting between Val and John was "the beginning of something."

"John is really excited because he is someone who needs to have a purpose," she said. "He needs to feel like he has a place in the world. He needs to feel like he has direction and ambition. There's a catharsis to that [meeting] for him."

In terms of casting Dreyfus for the role, Nagelhout said the Veep and Seinfeld Emmy winner "was just excited by the idea of joining this world and what it could mean to play a new quirky, weird, mysterious character. And she loved that there was this comedy to it as well because that's, of course, one of her great strengths. She was the perfect character to bring into John Walker's world to complicate what he's going through and give him a weird almost ominous light at the end of the tunnel."

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier will debut its season finale on Disney+ this Friday.

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