It must be exhausting to be Agent Phil Coulson.

First you spend countless hours wrangling personalities like Tony Stark and Thor, the God of Thunder, then you finally get all the Avengers in one room to save the world, and suddenly Loki puts a blade through your heart. Then you're somehow resurrected and installed back at S.H.I.E.L.D., and you still have to worry about dying yet again?

Though killing off the fan-favorite character a second time might seem like a quick way for Joss Whedon and his team at ABC to jump the shark bigtime and become the butt of fan jokes, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star Clark Gregg isn't ruling it out, and he explained why in a new interview with Comic Book Movie's Sci-fi Media Zone.

"You know, this is a world where people are vulnerable, so I don’t think that anyone’s safe — including Agent Coulson," Gregg said. "That said, it’s a hopeful show. It’s an optimistic world. What’s fun about this for me, and what I’ve always loved about the comics and about sci-fi is that there’s a way you can tell a story in an imaginative universe that you can’t in strict realism. You can take who we are right now and project it forward a little bit, or put a slight spin on it that makes us look at who we are through a lens that’s more real than real. TV feels like the perfect, serialized version of that. So to see the first couple of scripts, to see the way that they’ve found the thing that’s bigger than anything I’ve ever seen on TV, and yet to see the humans of that world represented is really exciting for me."

Now, we know the reputation Whedon has for pulling at our heartstrings with character deaths (though he'd prefer we never, ever ask him about it again), but of all the characters who might fall victim to the unique dangers of working at S.H.I.E.L.D. in the course of this series, could Coulson really be one of them? Could the guy who has been through it all and somehow come back be forced to face death again? We're thinking probably not, but even if he does have to stare down the Reaper a second time, it sounds like Clark Gregg's up for anything.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. premieres Sept. 24 on ABC.

(Via Comic Book Movie)