Warning: Massive Avengers: Age of Ultron spoilers are below. If you haven’t seen the film, avert your gaze now.

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One of Avengers: Age of Ultrons’ most shocking scenes came at the end, when Quicksilver sacrificed his life to save Hawkeye from a stream of bullets. Not many saw the new Avengers’ death coming, except for director Joss Whedon and Quicksilver actor Aaron Tyler Johnson, of course. In discussing Pietro Maximoff’s untimely demise, Whedon revealed how the death came to be.

“The first meeting I had with [Aaron], I said this is my plan is to have—we always were ready for the idea that the Disney brass would come down and say, 'excuse us. Please leave the beautiful man in the franchise movie.' But it became clear certainly after we shot it, how well it worked, so then it was just my job to spend the entire movie trying to convince everyone that Hawkeye was definitely going to die, and that turned into a really fun game.

Like, because I played every trope. Every, oh, look, you know, we’re not all going to make it through this and we cut to him looking at his family, and I’m just like, “How many ways can I be, ‘Oh, he’s safe. He’s on the, oh, he has to get off the boat. Oh, he’s—’ and I just wanted to like, you know, pull the switch out.” So yeah, that was the plan, but we did sort of keep it in our, in our pockets. We’re like maybe we’ll have to do a take backsies, but then he got shot a lot of times.”

But Age of Ultron never showed a gravesite for Quicksilver, leading some to suspect that the character still has some life in his legs. When asked about the missing grave, Whedon coyly responded:

“We didn’t what? Oh, that’s true.”

Were you sad to see Quicksilver sprint into the afterlife? Sound off in the comments below, and be sure to read ComicBook.com’s official Age of Ultron review!

Via Merlot Mommy.