Few items are more closely guarded in Hollywood than a new Marvel script. With so many interlocking stories being told simultaneously through films and Disney+ shows, a leak to the studio’s rabid fanbase could spoil a year’s worth of projects in one fell swoop.
The importance of secrecy certainly wasn’t lost on Karen Gillan and Pom Klementieff, who reprise their roles as Nebula and Mantis in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” The road to the conclusion of James Gunn’s cosmic superhero trilogy has been a long one, with Gunn briefly being fired from the project in 2018 before Marvel quickly re-hired him with the public support of his cast.
And that transitional period — when Gunn’s script was still being used but no director was in place — was challenging for the actors involved. They knew they had to stick together, so Gillan and Klementieff decided to secretly meet at Gillan’s house to read the script for the first time.
“I came over to Karen’s house and it was at a time where James Gunn was not supposed to do the movie anymore,” Klementieff told IndieWire. “So we decided to read the script together and we cried the whole time.”
“We laughed at the same time, then cried again,” Gillan added. “It was quite emotional.”
But the bonding experience ended — like so many things do these days — with a disagreement about whether a garden could be used as an underground storage facility for one of the most classified pieces of intellectual property on the planet.
“And then I got paranoid that someone would find the script. So I was like, ‘We should hide the script. Maybe we should bury it in the garden,’” Klementieff said. “I like to hide stuff, and then I can’t find it. I’m like a squirrel. That’s one of my problems.”
Burying scripts in a co-star’s garden might sound like the kind of bizarre celebrity ritual that could be common in Hollywood — but Gillan made it clear that she was just as baffled by the request as the rest of us.
“She legitimately asked me to bury the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ script in my garden,” Gillan said with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘What do you mean? Put it in a cupboard or something!’”
A Walt Disney release, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” hits theaters on Friday, May 5.
