Captain Marvel revolves around Brie Larson's title character, a former US Air Force pilot named Carol Danvers whose life is transformed when she acquires the powers of an advanced alien race – superhuman strength and the ability to fly are two of them – and joins their intergalactic military service.

Larson takes on the historic mantle of playing the first Marvel female superhero to drive her own film. "I loved the character and I was impressed with the creative side of what they wanted to do with the film," she says. 

Set in 1995, it's the arrival of the shape-shifting Skrulls, led by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn in serious prosthetics as their leader Talos, that loops the plot back to earth and Samuel L. Jackson's Marvel fixture, Nick Fury.

"For me, the Marvel universe is something I've sat back and watched with a bit of awe really at the power of it all," Mendelsohn says. "They've had an incredible decade of making these blockbuster films. There are some of them that I think are fantastic."

The movie is the 21st entry in the 11 years long and running Marvel Cinematic Universe, introducing a female superhero to hopefully disrupt the studio's conventions in the same way that Black Panther's Afrocentric lineage did.

Mendelsohn has covered every corner of the blockbuster map, and now he's an alien leader intent on conquering Earth in Marvel's new superhero epic, Captain Marvel.

"Working with people who know what they're doing," is his biggest qualifier for how a shoot might go." The actor went back into the comic book archives to research Talos and the Skrulls, who first appeared on the page of a Fantastic Four comic book in 1961, but it was the thoughts of his directors and the circumstances in front of the camera that wielded the biggest influence.

"I started out with a lot of ideas and notes before I read where we landed and then you get to what you've got to do in the story and the scenes," Mendelsohn says. "Then [directors] Ryan [Fleck] and Anna [Boden] say, 'We'd like you to do it like this' and you go 'OK, yeah', and you hope that combination of the instincts of the people doing this are on song."