Morena Baccarin on Joss Whedon Wanting Her for Maria Hill

If you haven’t had a chance to check out NBC’s Morena Baccarin (Elena Federova) & Ryan Michelle Bathé (FBI Agent Val Turner)-starring The Endgame, definitely do because it’s exactly the right kind of escapist fun we could all use right now. Of course, having Deadpool and Firefly star Baccarin co-leading pretty much guarantees something worth your time. But now we’re learning something interesting about Baccarin’s career, specifically how she almost became a part of the Marvel Universe in an entirely different way. How does “Morena Baccarin as S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent Maria Hill” sound?

Checking in with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Baccarin offered some backstory on how she came to audition for the role in Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers (with the two having worked together on Firefly). While the controversial figure was keen on her for the role (likening it to a famous sci-fi character), Baccarin readily admits to the hosts that she wasn’t seeing on the page what Whedon was describing to her. “I didn’t get it at all, I didn’t get it at all. I love that [Whedon] brought me in for it. He kept telling me she was like Sigourney Weaver in ‘Alien,’ that she had this kind of hard edge to her, and I was like ‘I don’t understand.’ I couldn’t see it on the page, I couldn’t do it,” she explained. Interestingly enough, Baccarin would end up testing alongside the person who would eventually go on to play the role on the big and small screens, Cobie Smulders. As Baccarin remembers, it as pretty clear Smulders was the one for the role. “I tested. I was there with Cobie, we tested against each other and I was like, ‘She’s going to get this part, I can see it.’ He wanted me to be emotional but hold it all in and be hard, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re asking me to do. I can’t do it,'” she added.

Now here’s a preview of Baccarin in this official first look at NBC’s The Endgame:

A pulse-pounding high-stakes two-hander about Elena Federova, a recently captured international arms dealer and brilliant criminal mastermind who orchestrates a number of coordinated bank heists throughout New York City for a mysterious purpose. Her antagonist is Val Turner, the principled, relentless and socially outcast FBI agent who will stop at nothing to foil her ambitious plan. The gripping heist drama reveals how far some people will go for love, justice and the most valuable commodity in the world: the truth.

Nicholas Wootton writes and executive produces, with Jake Coburn, Julie Plec, Emily Cummins, Andrew Schneider, and pilot director Justin Lin also executive producing. NBC’s The Endgame is produced by Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, with Nicholas Wootton Productions, Jake Coburn Productions, My So-Called Company, and Perfect Storm Entertainment.