Marvel’s always extremely careful to keep new developments under wraps. That’s why it’s so strange that they may have leaked the identity of Emilia Clarke’s character. Fans have known that she’d be appearing in Secret Invasion for a while, but nobody knew who she was playing. The show is coming to Disney+ next year, and it has huge implications for the MCU going forward.
Marvel was reportedly adding gifs from Secret Invasion into the Tenor GIF database. Eventually, they added one of Emilia Clark saying the phrase: “It’s the beginning.” When fans took a look at the filename in the database, they realized something. The filename was “it’s the beginning abigail brand.” They matched it against the other files of known characters, which pretty much followed the same format.
That seems to mean that Emilia Clark is almost surely playing Abigail Brand on Secret Invasion. But who exactly is Abigail Brand? In Marvel Comics, she’s the leader of S.W.O.R.D., which is a sister organization to S.H.I.E.L.D. S.W.O.R.D. is responsible for defending the Earth from extraterrestrial threats. Aside from all of her affiliations, she’s also just a really interesting character on her own.
In general, a lot of people tend to be fairly wary of Brand, especially Nick Fury. At least in the comics, Brand is also half-alien, with her father belonging to an unnamed race. While Nick Fury is a little suspicious of Abigail Brand, she’s extremely important to the Secret Invasion storyline. When the Skrulls show up and start wreaking havoc on earth, she quickly becomes one of the main players in driving them away.
As of now, there’s no official date for the Disney+ premiere of Secret Invasion. All we know is that it’ll be streaming on the service sometime next year.
Sign up for Disney+ here.
The Best Marvel Heroes Who Haven’t Joined the MCU Yet
These great Marvel characters have yet to make the jump to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
