This maneuvering isn’t limited to major characters like Blade (Mahershala Ali). Even a character like Agent Cleary from the Department of Damage Control is not below the notice of Marvel’s big boss. Arian Moayed’s character first appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home as the cunning investigator of Peter’s (Tom Holland) supposed crimes. He recently showed up again in the same capacity to track down Kamala Kahn (Iman Vellani) on Ms. Marvel.
“It’s a Kevin thing,” Ms. Marvel showrunner Bisha K. Ali told The Hollywood Reporter when asked how Cleary made the cut for the Disney+ series. “Kevin knows all that, man. He introduced the idea of Agent Cleary being a part of our show, and that’s the thing about working with Marvel. Kevin and the execs know all the pieces that we might not even know, so they’ll come in and be like, ‘OK, you have this, so let’s manifest it through this piece, interconnecting it with something else.’ And that’s the thrill of being a part of the MCU. So that’s definitely a Kevin fix.”
And this is not a case of a character becoming a fan favorite and thus being dropped into a new show. Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel were filming at the same time, so no one had any attachment to Cleary at the time. (It was probably pretty convenient for Moayed to commute from one set to the other in Atlanta, though!) This makes the continuity of his character all the more impressive, considering Ali told THR they didn’t even “get dailies for Agent Cleary” to get a sense of him in No Way Home.
Pushing such a minor character is perhaps nitpicky, but an undoubtedly galaxy-brained move from Feige to make the universe feel truly interconnected. On the other hand, maybe he just wanted Ms. Marvel to have its own Jimmy Woo moment. Either way, the Easter egg-loving fandom are surely eating it up.
