'Hawkeye' directors hint at bigger future for Laura Barton in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

It's been just over a fortnight since the Hawkeye finale strongly hinted that Linda Cardellini's Laura Barton is Agent 19 (aka "Mockingbird") in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and fans are still wondering what that might mean for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Is the ABC television show — and by extension Adrianne Palicki's Bobbi Morse — still canon or has it all been erased from the Marvel Studios continuity like Thanos killing off half the universe with a snap of his gauntleted fingers?

No answers have made themselves apparent and odds are good we won't get any for a good long while. With all of that said, however, two of Hawkeye's directors — Bert & Bertie — recently alluded to a bigger and brighter future for Laura, whose MCU story may only just be starting as her husband plans to hang up his bow and quiver.

“It sounds like everyone’s picked up on the details they needed to…like, what will happen next with Linda Cardellini’s character?" the filmmaking duo said on the most recent episode of the D23 Inside Disney podcast. "That’s the detail you needed to pick up on and you have. Congratulations. When you have an actor like that, how can you not want to deepen their character? Throughout all of the Avengers movies, there’s been this ultimate understanding. You’re like, ‘How is this woman so understanding of Clint Barton’s life and what he has to go and do?’ And maybe that’s just about to be answered. You never know…"

Again, nothing concrete here — just a tease of what could be. In any case, Clint deserves a nice, long rest on the farm. It's high-time Laura got out into the world and kicked some behind. Perhaps a future team-up with Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) is in the cards? Or maybe Laura is the connective tissue between the MCU and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.? If Kingpin (Vincent D'Onofrio) and Daredevil (Charlie Cox) can be saved from Netflix purgatory, then anything is possible! Canon schmanon. This is the world of comic books, where reality is constantly being rewritten; where different universes endlessly bash into one another like sped up particles in the Hadron Collider.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of Wilson Fisk's return, Bert & Bertie also spoke about the intense secrecy protocols enacted to keep D'Onofrio's appearance under tight wraps.

“They smuggled him in and they smuggled him out … But God knows how they got Vincent there and then you’ve also gotta remember you have doubles," they explained. "We had two doubles for Vincent, so both of them had to be smuggled in as well because they had the look. They were larger men with no hair and so even if you’d seen them on set in costume, people would have guessed who they were. All three of these amazingly huge frames were kind of smuggled under black cloaks, which is all very exciting."

Yeah right — we imagine that gaudy Hawaiian shirt had to be visible from outer space. Not even the thickest cloak known to humankind would be able to hide a fashion faux pas of that magnitude.

All six episodes of Hawkeye are now streaming on Disney+.