*A few Fury-related spoilers from across the MCU.*
Nick Fury has been part of the MCU since before the MCU as we know it existed. His time with the franchise dates all the way back to its first film. When he stepped out of the shadows in Iron Man’s post-credits scene, offering to tell Tony about “the Avengers initiative,” he ignited millions of nerdy dreams. Throughout much of Phase 1, his brief appearances were the largest connecting factor between the movies before The Avengers hit. Let’s talk about the man, the myth, the legend, Nicholas J. Fury.
Of course, his story starts long before we initially meet him onscreen. Back in the ‘90s, he was a dedicated S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who was thrown into an experience like nothing he’d ever seen before: alien Skrulls who could assume human form, a woman who could shoot photon blasts from her hands and was working to neutralize the supposed threat. Over the course of his roller coaster adventure—which even took him into orbit and brought him face-to-face with a tentacled alien cat!—his perspective on aliens, powered individuals, and the kinds of danger facing Earth grew exponentially.
It was Fury’s encounter with Carol Danvers that led him to come up with the Avengers initiative, but he’s not able to put it into practice until years later. Throughout Phase 1, he and his team make overtures to various exceptional folks, He brings together a mercurial billionaire tech genius, an upstanding war relic who’s been pulled out of his own time, a scientist whose immense but uncontrolled abilities are the doubled-edged byproduct of his own experiments, and the alien god of thunder. They’re bolstered by two nonpowered but highly skilled S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives Fury trusts; he’s an old spy who’s been in the game a long time, and he’s not going to throw a group of powerful strangers into a room and just hope they work it out.
That’s the beginning of Fury’s work with the Avengers. Things change over the years: new heroes join the team, agencies fall, and new threats continually emerge. He first directs from a massive Helicarrier, then from a high-tech corner office, then from the barn of a safe house after faking his death. He deals with skeptical politicians and bureaucrats, and he uncovers traitors in his own organization. He coordinates missions to fight alien armies, secret Nazi loyalists, and killer AI, among others.
Despite his general wariness and habit of always being prepared for things to go south, he isn’t 100% cynical. When the World Security Council loses faith in the Avengers to deal with the threat of Loki and his army, preparing to take devastatingly drastic measures of their own, Fury uses a tragic situation at hand to motivate his disparate group of heroes to become the team he knows they can be. When he learns how deeply Hydra has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D., he at first believes they can burn out the traitorous elements and leave the organization itself intact, and he needs Steve to convince him that the damage goes down to the foundations. When he realizes that an extremist Skrull cell has plans to manipulate humanity into wiping itself out, he’s far more mercenary than Talos in how he goes about stopping them, but he acknowledges how many Skrulls are not his enemy.
He's smart, cagey, and more than a little ruthless. He has plans within plans, and hardly anyone but him knows the full extent of them. He’s aware that he has to give up pawns to stay in the game, but he doesn’t stay above the fray as a general who never risks his neck.
After Thanos’s snap, as the world is falling apart and he’s just seen his longtime friend and colleague crumble into dust in front of him, as he himself is about to start crumbling into dust, he uses his last few seconds to send an S.O.S. for his old friend Carol to come back to Earth. That’s the kind of man Nick Fury is.
