Agents of SHIELD: Brett Dalton Teases Ward's New Purpose

Plus what the deal with the slug thing is. By Terri Schwartz

Full spoilers for the first half of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD: Season 3 continue below.

It's official: Grant Ward is dead. During Agents of SHIELD's midseason finale, "Maveth," the former SHIELD agent finally met Phil Coulson's wrath on a planet far from Earth. Coulson crushed Ward's chest with his robotic hand, killing him -- but, as the episode revealed, that's not the last viewers will be seeing of star Brett Dalton.

Brett Dalton on Marvel's Agents of SHIELD

The actor isn't going anywhere even though his character is dead, because the mystery Inhuman living on the planet took over Ward's body and escaped through the portal between the worlds and made it to Earth. Now he's on SHIELD's turf after waiting centuries (maybe even millennia) for his chance to cross over, and no one -- characters or fans -- seem to know what to make of him.

Following the episode's airing, Dalton took a break from shooting the back half of the season to chat with me on the phone about the introduction of Ward 2.0. He opened up about what he's bringing to this character that he didn't bring to Ward, why he doesn't think he'll be permanently killed off any time soon and what he thinks fans should look forward to when Agents of SHIELD returns.

IGN: People freaked out a bit after the Agents of SHIELD midseason finale. Break the Ward situation down for me as much as you understand it. It seems like Ward is dead, but we have this new mystery Inhuman slug thing that's possessing him.

Brett Dalton: I think you're doing a good job. I don't know what more I can add! This creature has been occupying this other dimension, this other land on the other side of this portal, for centuries -- this is the history lesson that Malick breaks down. Monuments have been built in this creature's honor. Hydra finally, thanks to the ingenuity of Fitz and Simmons, finds a way to open the portal and bring it back. That's what this whole mission was, and in some ways it was a success and in other ways it was a failure because Ward didn't come back exactly the same. But it did bring back this creature, just maybe not in the way that they anticipated. I mean, this guy looks like Ward, but this is a new chapter for the character and for me as the actor playing it. It will be a whole new set of challenges. It's a big deal.

IGN: Fans debated up until the bitter end whether or not Ward was a redeemable character. Whether he was or not, I think we can all agree that he died on a villainous note. Now you have a new character, you have a new play set. Where are we starting with this character and what are some of the things you can play into with him that you couldn't with Ward?

Dalton: That's a very good question, and I hope I can answer it in a somewhat smart way. [laughs] This is a new set of challenges very much unlike the first twist in Season 1. As an actor, I've more or less gotten to play a new character each season, and it's incredibly cool and incredibly challenging and fun. But in many ways this is probably the hardest iteration of this character because we aren't dealing with a "human being" anymore. This is Ward 2.0. This is a human being plus something else, this is a human body being occupied by a creature that's been around for centuries. In Season 1, it was like "oh hey, by the way, you're a spy and you have this checkered past." This is like "oh hey, by the way, your body is being inhabited by something else." [laughs] So that can seem like maybe a harder thing to pull off. I think we're definitely doing it. You'll have to tune in and watch to see just where it goes.

I had a lot of fun with Ward. It was bittersweet -- I'm talking about Ward as we know and love him now, not evil Ward 2.0. I had a lot of fun in the last few episodes, which I felt were in particular very good for him as a character. Episode 8 he just got to be badass from top to bottom: an incredible fight scene, all the stuff with Malick, he went through this history lesson. And then episode 9 is called "Closure," and in a way he starts on this path of actually getting closure. For the first time he stops his single-minded focus on taking Coulson down and he sees the big picture and decides to go on this hero's journey on to the other side and into the unknown, and while he's there in episode 10 he gets to another level of closure right there.

There's that scene in there where he has this monologue which a lot of people thought I sounded like I was a born-again, devout, off-my-rocker person at that point, but it was, I think, a real moment for Ward where he actually gets a sense of there's something greater than revenge and all of these smaller emotions; there's actually something that's bigger out there that he's a part of. I was very proud, stepping out of Ward. I was like, "I'm very proud of this Ward guy. Good for him. He had to go to another planet to experience this, but good for him. He found it." This is a really long answer to your question.

IGN: I like it. It was a really long question.

Dalton: There's a whole bunch of different things that I get to explore with this creature; I guess you could call it Ward 2.0. Ward had this past, he had this drive. Revenge was a really big driving force for him. Getting even, settling scores, all that was a really big motivation for Ward, and this particular creature I don't think is driven by the same things. He has access to all of the thoughts and memories of all of the hosts that he's occupied in the past, and we see that -- I'm not giving away anything -- we see that in episode 10. He's able to convince Fitz that he's Will no problem, and he has at least a knowledge of all the stuff that's happened in the past.

So he has this collective memory that goes back centuries. I think that when you're playing something like that, you're not going to be bound by things as small as revenge. There's something much, much bigger at work. I think that there's a kind of regalness. This is a guy who's used to being worshipped and monuments built in his honor. There's an efficiency to his thoughts and movements. He's operating on a higher point, so in some ways he's not bound by the same emotions that Grant Ward is.

IGN: Does that mean that you're trading one villainous character for another? What can you say of this new creature's motivations?

Dalton: If I do it right, sure, absolutely, this would be trading one for the other. But also, Malick mentioned something about there was a purpose for every Inhuman. They each had their own task or their own cog in this bigger machinery. That was one of the themes of one of the episodes. Perhaps this creature's task is somehow is even bigger than -- I'm trying not to give away plot stuff. [He has a bigger task] than some of the other Inhumans, and that might be his task in this greater picture.

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