Fillion’s masked mercenary is an oddity even inside the stranger-makes-you-stronger world of The Suicide Squad, DC Comics’ most exuberantly balls-to-the-wall superhero blockbuster yet (and a quasi-sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad).

As T.D.K., who has the strange ability to detach his limbs and control them from afar, Fillion commits to a tongue-in-cheek riff on Arm-Fall-Off-Boy (an honest-to-goodness comic-book character who debuted in Secret Origins #46, in 1989). As this weird hero dodges bullets along a South American shoreline, Fillion says all the sand offered him some uncomfortable realism to offset the manufactured mayhem.

With Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s series finale coming up, Clark Gregg’s 12-year journey through the Marvel Cinematic Universe is over, at least for now – and what a ride it’s been. From helping kick off the MCU in Iron Man and getting a big-screen death scene in The Avengers to leading the members of S.H.I.E.L.D. for seven seasons on ABC, Gregg’s Phil Coulson has pretty much seen and done it all, and managed to become one of the most popular characters in the MCU along the way.

While it seems unlikely that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s final episode will actually be the last time that we see Coulson – hey, he’s survived worse – we took the time to chat with Gregg as he reflected on his time in the MCU, and discussed a little bit about what he;s doing next. Here’s what he had to say.

Amy Acker voices Lois Lane in the new animated movie, Superman: Red Son which is available now. She talks to Comic Book Central about that…

“We started talking in terms of redemption,” says Whedon. “We realized, while Buffy is about the hero’s journey — that ‘becoming the person you are’ that happens in adolescence — Angel is about dealing with the person you’ve been.” Or, as co-creator Greenwalt, 69, puts it: “Buffy has this wonderful purpose and fights evil, but still wants to go to the prom and get the right dress. Angel is a much darker and, in a sense, more complex character.”

Although we know this isn’t Coulson, the premiere doesn’t tell us who Sarge is, what he wants, or where he came from. Luckily, EW visited the set of the ABC drama in September and spoke to Gregg and costar Ming Na-Wenn (who plays Coulson’s love Melinda May) about Sarge’s arrival, May’s reaction to Coulson’s doppelgänger and more.

As interconnected as Agents of SHIELD was with Marvel’s films in the show’s earliest days, Gregg said, it’s by carving out its space within the MCU and drawing on unprotected pieces of source material that the series has been able to set itself apart.

“In my mind, Captain America doesn’t know he’s alive. It’s bittersweet to me,” he laughed. “We know that Nick Fury knows, obviously, we’ve seen him. And I feel like Tony Stark knows things — he just finds a way to know things — but I think the two of them have had a blunt conversation about it and decided not to share it further.

“I always think of that thing, you know, find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. I think that’s Phil Coulson,” he added. “He loves this stuff. And like me, he shows up to do a job and it just keeps getting better and more interesting and then incredible people show up and it’s beyond his wildest dreams.”

I really just tried to forget an awful lot of traumatic, horrible stuff and terrible secrets from around the universe that he just doesn’t know yet. I tried to go back to a more naive, innocent place, which was not easy for me or Phil. We’re both jaded by the universe at this point.