The Avengers

’Avengers’ Star Alexis Denisof On Playing A Secret Villain And Reuniting With Joss Whedon

Alexis Denisof, who has worked with Joss Whedon on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” “Dollhouse” and the upcoming Shakespeare adaptation “Much Ado About Nothing,” is accustomed to a certain way of coming aboard a Whedon project. “Normally if something is on his mind he’ll call me about it,” Denisof told MTV News. “And of course I’m always excited. It wouldn’t matter what he was doing, I would want to be part of it.”

But Denisof’s most recent Whedonverse appearance happened a little differently. “I received from my agent a single page with some lines that made absolutely no sense to me, and a character called Man 2. And I was like, ‘What the eff is this?’”

Assuming that Whedon was likely busy on set, Denisof refrained from giving his old friend a call for more information. All he knew was that the film was "Marvel’s The Avengers" and he’d have to keep quiet about it. “They sent all this legal stuff I had to sign about not saying anything to anyone.”

After Denisof auditioned and got the part of the character presently known as The Other (the mysterious fellow who converses with Loki a couple of times and then with Thanos after the credits), he had to deal with the challenge of prosthetics. “We had to cast all these parts of my body that were going to be wearing pieces of formed prosthetic – my arms, my chest, my face,” he said. There was also a special set of teeth made. “Once I put them in I had a very distinct lisp and I didn’t think that was how he should sound, so I had to practice with those for quite a few months to get to where I could even talk.”

It took six hours to put everything on, followed by more hours of discomfort. “I couldn’t see a thing,” Denisof recalled. “Pretty hard to move, pretty hard to go to the bathroom – a lot of things you don’t think about until you’re all stitched up into a costume like that.”

It was all worth it, though. “Even when I was shooting it I was excited,” Denisof said. “To see that huge stage and to be in that place with my dear friend Joss and watch him doing what I know so well he can do on that scale… I was thrilled to be part of it. And then to see it – it blew me away.”

Denisof is understandably mum on exactly where and when we’ll see his character again, but it seems very likely that there will be a place for him in the next “Avengers” installment.