A Few Thoughts on Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Roles of 2023

Like so many other people, I had the odd experience of watching Kingsley Ben-Adir play the villain in a Marvel show and one of the Kens from Barbie one right after the other. And honestly, my effect was diluted, because I wasn’t able to see Barbie until a few weeks after it was released—when it first came out, episodes of Secret Invasion were still dropping! I rewatched Barbie recently, and it reminded me that this dichotomy might be the starkest demonstration I’ve ever seen that a role’s size matters far less than its content.

I’m hardly alone in saying I was disappointed in Secret Invasion, for so many reasons. I won’t rehash all that again, but one of the things I’d been anticipating about the show was seeing Ben-Adir as Gravik. I knew how talented he was—I’ve seen One Night in Miami—but for me, this was another area where the series disappointed me. Not because Ben-Adir gave a bad performance, but because the character of Gravik gave him so little to hold onto. In fact, the few scenes where he really got to shine just highlighted how much he was wasted on the show.

In contrast, we have Barbie. Now, Ben-Adir plays probably a second-tier Ken—obviously less prominent than Ryan Gosling’s, and less than Simu Liu’s as well. But that doesn’t hold him back in the slightest, because he’s an utter delight every time he’s onscreen. Whether he’s holding Gosling-Ken’s ice cream, gagging at the sight of Robbie-Barbie’s flat feet, or serenading a Barbie on the trap set while the rest of the Kens play guitar, he makes the most of every moment, effortlessly funny and memorable.

How can that be? With only a handful of lines and reaction shots in a single blockbuster, how can Ben-Adir make a bigger impact than as the main antagonist with multiple monologues in a six-episode TV series? Simply put, Ben-Adir’s Ken is a great example of a side character functioning perfectly within a story. He improves every scene he’s in without stealing focus, and even with a thin characterization, everything he does totally tracks with who he is. Meanwhile, Gravik never really gets off the ground as a character—his motivations come too late and feel too small, and a number of his actions conflict with one another. Ken is a terrific sandbox for Ben-Adir to play around in, but Gravik is just dead weight pulling him down.

This isn’t the first time I’ve thought that supporting roles don’t have to be lesser. For example, one of my favorite Tony Leung Chiu-wai roles is still his performance as Broken Sword in Hero, and there’s no other role in the film I’d have rather seen him play. I’ve been semi-obsessively writing up Favorite Characters posts for Our Flag Means Death, and no matter how little screentime the various crew members get, each one embodies their character fantastically. But the contrast between these two roles makes the point so clearly, and the fact that they were released on top of one another heightens it even more.

As an offshoot of this notion, I saw some chatter after Barbie came out that Ben-Adir should’ve had Liu’s role as the rival to Gosling-Ken. That definitely would’ve been a bigger role for him, and I don’t doubt that he could’ve been a lot of fun in it. But personally, I wouldn’t have wanted to give up his hilarious, winning performance as his Ken. I wouldn’t trade a moment of that sweet, dumb guy asking the other Kens to guess what bird he’s thinking of (“Pelican,”) or proudly asserting, “I have hats”—more screentime as a different character wouldn’t have been worth it when he’s so good as this one.

Character Highlight: Talos (The Avengers)

*Talos-related spoilers for Captain Marvel and Secret Invasion.*

I’m on record as not having been that impressed with Secret Invasion, but I have enjoyed Talos throughout his regrettably limited time in the MCU, including in the series in question. We’ll talk a little about that today, at least the good bits, but I can say that one positive about the show is that it reminded me I’ve never done a write-up on Talos.

In Captain Marvel, Talos is introduced as the baddie. We learn about the Kree’s war with the Skrulls, and the inherent tension and paranoia that comes with fighting against them due to their shapeshifting abilities. And when the Skrulls come to Earth, it at first seems no different. From our perspective, we see Talos infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D. by assuming the guise of Fury’s boss. As Fury helps Carol attempt to protect Earth from the Skrulls while also digging into her own shrouded past, we’re primed to view Talos as the shadowy bad guy.

Side note: casting Ben Mendelsohn in this role demonstrates topnotch deployment of genre savvy. We know that Mendelsohn is known for playing villains, so when we see him playing an apparent villain, we have no reason to question it.

Except! Later in the film, it’s revealed that Talos’s mission on Earth is actually to recover a number of Skrull refugees in hiding, including his own wife and daughter. Through him, we learn that much of what we, and Carol, know about Skrulls is the product of xenophobic Kree propaganda. Rather than being untrustworthy monsters who vibe on taking over other people’s identities, the Skrulls have had to flee their home planet due to the relentless attacks by a race that’s determined to wipe them out. For the third act, Carol and Talos team up so she can help him rescue his waylaid people.

Through Secret Invasion, we’re given glimpses at what happens to Talos and the Skrulls in the long interim between the ‘90s and the 2020s. Fury makes way for the Skrulls to find asylum, in secret, on Earth, and in exchange, Talos vouches for him when he looks to recruit some of them for extra-covert S.H.I.E.L.D. operations. As Talos points out during one of their tenser moments, Fury rose through the ranks at S.H.I.E.L.D. thanks in part to intel gained by his top-secret squad of Skrull spies. And after all that the Skrulls have given him, he doesn’t seem to have made any progress on working with Carol to find them a permanent home.

So, as Gravik leads a radicalized group of disillusioned Skrulls in attacks on humanity, Talos condemns his actions but understands the pain and anger behind it. This places him in an incredibly difficult position on the show. He trusts and respects Fury and wants to help him, and of course he wants to stop Gravik, but it breaks his heart to think of the Skrulls that will be hurt or killed to accomplish that. Even though they’re very much in the wrong, he wants to see them brought to justice, not annihilated.

This inner conflict brings him at times into a more outward one with Fury, who’s more than willing to shoot, torture, and kill any Skrull who’s working with Gravik. Talos’s help is invaluable to Fury, as his shapeshifting allows them to infiltrate the scene of key extremist plots, but Fury thinks Talos is too soft, while Talos thinks Fury is too cavalier with Skrull lives. Essentially, everything Talos has been holding together for the last 30 years is on the brink of collapsing, and he sometimes feels like the only one who’s invested in preserving peace.

One small but significant moment that I love comes in the first episode, when Fury and Talos expose one of Gravik’s collaborators and pump him for info. The extremist attacks Talos, and a fight ensues. But when Fury kills the collaborator, Talos looks positively bereft as he simply, firmly states, “I said no.” He may have regrets about his choices over the years, and he may be naïve in his hope that everything will work out if the Skrulls can just demonstrate to world leaders that they’re good and useful, but I don’t envy the hard position he’s in here.

Spoilery Thoughts on Secret Invasion

*Spoilers.*

I’m getting into the weeds on Secret Invasion today. As I said in my review, this show didn’t really work for me, which was a disappointment. While I mentioned some of my issues with the series in that earlier post, I’m heading into more detail on that here.

First and foremost, we have to look at the episode-ending cliffhangers. Three separate episodes end, not just with a major character being killed, but a major character being specifically shot by Gravik. Yes, G’iah’s “death” at the end of episode 3 is revealed to have been a ruse at the start of the next episode, but still. Fully half of the episodes in this series end with the exact same “twist.” What’s more, the actual deaths, those of Maria Hill and Talos, aren’t remotely worth it. I’d call them fridgings, but their deaths don’t even really motivate Fury throughout his arc. He gets one sad scene with Hill’s mother against the backdrop of Hill’s flag-draped coffin being unloaded from a plane, and that’s basically it for her. Unless you count Cobie Smulders’s name in the credits of every single episode because the show gave her regular status to avoid revealing that she dies in the very first episode, which ugh. And by the time Talos is killed, the ball is rolling so heavily that Fury doesn’t really have time to slow down and react much at all. We do get Priscilla helping G’iah lay him to rest, but we barely see G’iah interact with her dad on the show. Talos’s relationship with Fury is much more prominent, and yet after he’s gone, Fury seems to pay him little mind.

Next, the way numerous characters repeat the same refrains over and over gets on my nerves. “Fury’s gotten old—he can’t stop us.” “Fury hasn’t been the same since the Blip.” “Why didn’t Fury find us a home like he promised?” “After the Blip, Fury abandoned Earth and went off to space with S.A.B.R.E.” Again and again, hammering the same points home, with hardly any progression on any of them. Why hasn’t Fury and/or Carol Danvers found a planet where the Skrulls can live freely, or at the bare minimum made plans to introduce them as refugees on Earth now that New Asgard is so firmly established? What has Fury been dealing with mentally and emotionally since the Blip, and how is he handling it? But instead of diving into these issues, we just keep going around the same carousel of remarks/questions. And returning to the show’s love of “twists,” the one time Fury appears to talk honestly with Gravik about how he couldn’t find a home for the Skrulls, it’s revealed that it’s actually G’iah pretending to be Fury. So are the reasons she gives actually true? Did Fury tell her that? Or is she just pulling it out of her ass? Who cares, right?

Finally, sticking with the “twist” theme, let’s talk about major MCU characters who are revealed to have been impersonated by Skrulls. After all the “anyone could be a Skrull!!!!” hype, we see exactly two: Everett Ross, who’s revealed at the start of the series, and Rhodey, who’s teased in episode 3 and revealed in episode 4, with a mention in the finale that he was switched “a long time” ago. The show never says how long—here’s hoping Armor Wars can shed a lot more light on Rhodey—but there are details to suggest it’s been as far back as Civil War. Which, frankly, sucks. It would mean his talk in Endgame with Nebula about their disabilities wasn’t our Rhodey. It would mean Rhodey missed Tony’s wedding and his funeral, and he’s never met Tony’s daughter. So even though the much-hyped major shakeups to the MCU turned out to only be a couple of second-tier characters, it managed to potentially wreck a lot of important stuff for Rhodey’s story. As I said in my review, it’s both too little and too much at once.

There are plenty of other little things, confounding plot developments and Idiot Ball moments and an overreliance on torture as a plot device, but those are the biggest things that stood out to me. Again, it’s a shame, because Samuel L. Jackson has delivered throughout his many years in the MCU, and he deserved something a lot better for a spotlight series on Fury.