Spoilers ahead for folks who haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Things are starting to get weird in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I, for one, couldn't be happier. The latest bit of strangeness added to the MCU came courtesy of Kurt Russell's role in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. If you find yourself asking why Russell's role was so weird because you haven't seen the film yet, turn back now.

In the latest episode of the Empire Podcast, Gunn fielded a number of questions regarding his smash-hit sequel and quite a few of his answers ventured into very nerdy territory. So while the full episode is worth a listen for Gunn's insight, we've pulled some interesting explanations about the origin of Ego, the duplicitous character played by Russell in the space-faring adventure film. Check out his answers below:

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Image via Marvel

When asked if Gunn knew that Ego was going to be Peter Quill’s dad at the time he’d finished the first Guardians of the Galaxy, he said:

Around that point. I knew before the movie who his father was, like I knew that he was a Celestial, he was a being of great power, made of light, who created himself. So I knew what the origin of Ego was; I knew who he was. I don’t think I decided upon Ego the Living Planet until around the end of the first movie. I definitely didn’t tell Kevin [Feige] until after we opened up and made a lot at the box office opening weekend.

Was he always intended to be the villain?

Oh yeah, I knew his father was quite a bad guy. I thought of him as a very, very bad guy. And he is; he’s really bad.

How bad? Well, remember that Ego not only planned to kill billions across numerous planets, but was also responsible for killing Meredith Quill, as played in both films by Laura Haddock. When did Gunn decide on that plot point?

I knew that from before I started the first movie. I knew that when [Meredith] was talking about a being of pure light in the first movie—in the first scene of the first movie—that that was the man who killed her. That was always a part of what the first story was, in my head.

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Image via Marvel Studios

Despite killing her, did Ego actually love Meredith?

I think he feels those feelings of love. There used to be a little bit more, in earlier drafts of the script, of Ego being fascinated by being able to feel now that he has a human brain. He’s able to feel these human emotions, he’s able to experience them, but he experiences them in a way that he doesn’t really put any meaning or purpose on them. So he experiences love, but he just thinks of that as a thing to overcome, pretty simply and he does it pretty easily. In some ways that makes him worse ...

The most important, primary relationship in both Guardians of the Galaxy movies is really his relationship to Meredith Quill, and, of course, we have it revealed that the secondary relationship is really his relationship with Yondu. At the end of the day, Ego exists in the movie, in a lot of ways, just so we can see what Yondu means to Peter Quill.

How did Gunn decide on using Ego in the first place?

Quite honestly, I had discussions, Chris Pratt and I, early on about what we were doing with the second movie. I think that, in the wake of the first movie, both of us experienced this tremendous lift in our egos where we went from … he was the chubby, supporting actor on a sitcom and I was a guy directing cult, low-budget movies and suddenly, after that, I could direct any movie I wanted and he could star in any movie he wanted … I really think that the movie, in a lot of ways, is about us and our relationship to that ego, and not being destroyed by it, and allowing ourselves to still be ourselves and stay who we were before we started making the movie. That’s really, to me, the personal story of Vol. 2. … For me, it was just about his ego taking over everything. It was about “Brandy”, that song that they discuss and how Ego sees that song.

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Image via Marvel Studios

There's an extensive flashback sequence in the movie that features a CG-rejuvenated Kurt Russell. Here are Gunn's comments on the inspiration that brought the youthful version of Russell's character about:

It was mostly Used Cars era. We went through different times in Kurt Russell’s life and it was mostly Used Cars era. I wanted him to be … he’s still older than Meredith Quill. And we actually aged down Laura [Haddock] a little bit as well. Meredith Quill is in her late teens, very, very early 20s at most. Ego is still in his 30s, so there’s a significant age difference between the two of them even there.

You might think that keeping the existence of a living planet a secret would be tough when it's so important to the plot; you'd be right:

Early on, when we were making the movie, I knew that we didn’t reveal the fact that Ego was totally evil until halfway through the film. Even then, we just knew there was something wrong with him and we don’t really learn how evil he is until about two-thirds of the way through the film. I thought for sure, in the marketing materials, we were going to have to sell the fact that this is about the Guardians fighting a living planet. I didn’t think that Marvel was going to be as cool as they were in selling the movie and holding everything back from the marketing.

 

It was a weird situation where you’re telling a plot point that also has a relationship to what the marketing is, where the marketing is perhaps gonna give away the plot point. So then, do I just give it away earlier in the film? There was a version of the screenplay where I had given away the fact that he was evil in the very first scene. But we showed the movie to some test audiences and most of them didn’t know that Kurt Russell was the bad guy. So I actually went back and changed a couple of things in the movie so that we were less aware that Kurt Russell was the bad guy, so that when it does come … the audiences is automatically like, “Oh, wait a second…”

For more on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, be sure to take a look at our most recent write-ups below:

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