Titus Welliver first joined the Marvel universe in the short one-shot, “Item 47”. Taking place in the aftermath of the Battle of New York in 2012’s The Avengers, Welliver played SHIELD Agent Blake. The short saw Blake sending Agent Sitwell (later of “Hail HYDRA” fame, boooo, hiss!) to recover a lost Chitauri weapon from a pair of common criminals on a bank robbing spree. There it was implied he was previously the superior agent to Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson. No surprise then, with Coulson’s resurrection, Blake too cropped up on ABC’s Agents of SHIELD.
Now that SHIELD has a temporary NYC home at Discovery Times Square’s Marvel’s Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N. with Agent Blake inducting new agents on a daily basis, Welliver dropped by for a tour with his family last week. He gamely tried out several of the interactive exhibits and visited with some important Marvel props (including Item 47 itself). I was happy to get to tagalong with them, along with the exhibit’s executive director, Mark Smith. Both men were extremely knowledgable on their Marvel comics and it was a pleasure to see the exhibit in the company of these enthusiastic fans.
Lauren Damon: When you did Item 47, did you know Agents of the SHIELD could be happening?
Titus Welliver: No, Agents of SHIELD was probably in the works at that time, I didn’t know that they were going to do an Agents of SHIELD show. So when I did Item 47, it was just–I flipped out. I was so excited to do it. Because Blake and in that he’s kind of a Walter Mitty character, you can kind of tell he’s just champing at the bit to get out in the field and do something.
LD: Agent Blake’s background is having been a superior officer to Agent Coulson, did you and Clark Gregg have any discussion on their roles before the Avengers?
TW: No, I mean we didn’t. Clark was my roommate in college, so we’ve known each other for a really long time so he sort of hinted after I did Item 47 that there was stuff coming down the pipe. So when we actually got to work together it was pretty funny for us because we were such total goofoffs in college and now we’re like these Agents of SHIELD being all serious standing on the helicarrier so it’s really fun.
LD: Your SHIELD episodes aired prior to The Winter Soldier premiering, after those events, where does that put Agent Blake?
TW: Well they’ve got to reconstruct SHIELD now from the ground up now that’s it’s been so heavily compromised and destroyed. So it will be interesting to see how they resurrect SHIELD within–and as you saw on the show, it ended on a pretty bleak note. So…those writers are so good. They’ll find a way to bring it back up and I’m just happy for the show because I think it’s a smart show. I don’t think we’ve had anything like that you know, maybe The X-Files sort of the closest comparison I could come up with. And that was a phenomenal show. But with the science and the whole
Marvel universe, because everything is so interconnected, the places they can go are kind of endless.
LD: Finally, who is your favorite Avenger?
TW: My favorite Avenger? Captain America.
LD: Alright!
T
W: I mean…ahhh that’s hard! I mean, I like them all. But yeah, I’m a huge Captain America fan from way back and I have probably about eighty-five percent of the original Captain America comics. So yeah, I’m a big geek.
Fittingly, in Captain America’s space at the Discovery Center, I asked Mark Smith how they went about choosing which of Captain Rogers’s props would be placed within the exhibit:
Mark Smith: It’s based on the storyline really. So with Captain America, the rebirth pod was a big part of that. The initiation of the super soldier program itself so we wanted to make sure we had real props and costumes and pieces from the movie to be able to then blend into the storyline about how Captain America is the super soldier.
Marvel’s Avengers S.T.A.T.I.O.N. is now open at 44th street in New York’s Times Square, you can read more about visiting the center at its official website . In the meantime, Titus Welliver can currently be seen in “Transformers: Age of Extinction”.
