Guest star roles have been interesting in what’s been coming along in the second half of the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and now we’ve got another one as Patton Oswalt will be stepping in for a role in the near future. We recently had Bill Paxton coming on as an agent and Adrian Pasdar as one of the military men, now Oswalt will be an agent as well as it takes on Agent Eric Koenig. The character is not a TV original character, which is good as there’s actually a lot of agents that were used over the years in various incarnations. Koenig goes way back to Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #27 from 1966, which in those days was all about the World War II team and their adventures.
“I got a call from my agent saying they want you on Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and I said ‘hell, yes,’” recounts the actor. “I’m lucky that I’m visible enough that they wanted to bring me in to play this character. I’d worked with [‘Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ Executive Producer] Joss [Whedon] before on ‘Dollhouse,’ and I guess I wasn’t too annoying and they decided to put me on another one of his shows. So I was very lucky.”
When it comes to what he thought he was going to play, he definitely showed off his knowledge of the lore since he’s a Marvel fan himself.
“When they first told me the character’s name, I’ll admit the first thing I did is I went on Wikipedia and looked up the M.O.D.O.K. character to see if Koenig was maybe his name before he became M.O.D.O.K., but it wasn’t,” laughs Oswalt. “They keep on talking about the Clairvoyant in the show and I’m like, ‘is that M.O.D.O.K.? Am I M.O.D.O.K.?”
To further the view that he is definitely aware of not just the past but the present in the comics, he went on about the way the show is changing and some of how they’re doing it. “They’re using the Jonathan Hickman model of wheels-within-wheels,” explains Oswalt. “It’s getting into that John Le Carre, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ world now, which creates even more tension because you don’t know, is someone lying to me, and are they doing me a favor by lying to me? That’s really great stuff to play as an actor.”
Check out more of his thoughts on the show on Marvel.com.
