When thinking about the making of a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, security is a subject that immediately comes to mind. Films made as part of the franchise tend to be extremely cautious when it comes to the risk of secrets leaking out, and as a result there are often extra precautions put in place (like not giving actors complete versions of the scripts).
In the making of Chloé Zhao's Eternals, however, the production faced a different kind of security breach – which is a story recounted by star Lia McHugh in the exclusive commentary video featured above.
While watching what is the first big present-set action movie in the Marvel blockbuster (the fight with the Deviant in the streets of London), the actor who plays Sprite recalls that the shooting of the sequence was briefly interrupted because a pair of guys who evidently had gone a skosh overboard in the alcohol consumption department. As McHugh tells it, the production was filming in the middle of the night, and a bet was made essentially testing the set's security. Said the actor,
Richard [Madden] was working on the wire and, we were playing out a scene, and these two people who were clearly intoxicated... We were in downtown Camden at like two o'clock in the morning. They made a bet to see who could run through the security and get through the filming location.
As you might imagine, things didn't go particularly well as a result of this challenge. According to Lia McHugh, one of the men tried to sprint through the production, but he didn't make it all the way. What's more, it was an incident that ultimately increased security tenfold during the making of Eternals. She continued,
And this guy took off running, and the security guard had to tackle him. And for the rest of the time we were shooting, each of us had like 10 security guards on us at all times.
That's just one of the stories shared in the video above, which also features Lauren Ridloff (who played Makkari in the blockbuster) revealing how she influenced the contents of her character's library and a cute improvised moment in a scene with Barry Keoghan.
If that's not quite enough Eternals awesomeness for you, the good news is that you have options. The 2021 film is now available for purchase on digital platforms and on 4K, Blu-ray, and DVD. The home video release includes a pair of featurettes as well as a feature-length audio commentary with Chloé Zhao and visual effects supervisors Stephane Ceretti and Marten Larsson, and it has all varieties of great trivia.
When you get your copy, you can start planning your next Marvel movie rewatch, and get set for all of the Upcoming Marvel awesomeness that is hitting the big screen in the next few years.
