Marvel fans have always been attentive - just look at all the references the filmmakers packed into Avengers: Endgame to provide us with a rewarding experience after going out to see MCU movies for over a decade. However, there is such a thing as reading too much into a character’s screen time, which is perhaps what fans have done with a bit from Nick Fury’s backstory in Captain Marvel.
In a scene in Carol Danvers’ origin movie, she sits across from a digitally de-aged Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury as he attempts to convince her that he’s not a shapeshifted Skrull. As they get to know each other, Carol asks him to “name a detail so bizarre a Skrull could never fabricate it” to which Fury opens up about his inability to eat diagonally-cut toast.
The answer sparked a theory when fans referenced a scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron in which Fury is at Hawkeye’s farmhouse, makes himself a sandwich and then cuts the bread diagonally!! So obviously, fans think present-day Fury is a Skrull in disguise.
In a recent interview with ET, the Captain Marvel directors were asked to address the theory and here’s what they said:
Anna Boden: Well, there are two options here. Either Fury became a Skrull or he got over his weird fear of diagonally cut toast, and we'll never know the truth. [Laughs]Ryan Fleck: He actually became okay with people calling him Nick. So, you know, either he's a Skrull or he just changed, like we all do.
Does anyone else feel like they’re trying to confuse us more? The pair of directors do bring up a good point; Nick may have just changed his mind about diagonally-cut toast between the ‘90s and Age of Ultron, just as he became a more hardened as the years went on. However, the change in his demeanor is much of the reason why fans believe Fury is really a Skrull.
Another supporting idea for the Fury Skrull theory is that four of them landed on the beach in Captain Marvel and only three were ever seen again. Could it be true? The Skrulls did end up to be the good guys in the Kree-Skrull war, but maybe they wanted to be behind the Avengers Initiative? Wouldn’t that be quite the plot twist! The question would then be what happened to the real Nick Fury we met in Captain Marvel? Maybe it would explain why he never called on Carol for help in the previous Marvel films before Endgame.
Or perhaps this is just a random situation that the MCU forgot to fact check before the release of Captain Marvel. It is a pretty deep cut (pun intended) that most fans would not have noticed or remembered upon Fury bringing it up.
Maybe we'll get some answers when Samuel L. Jackson reprises his role as Nick Fury in Spider-Man: Far From Home, coming to theaters on July 2.
