One of the biggest surprises concerning The Avengers television show Agents of SHIELD is that one character is being brought back from the dead. How is that possible?

Today the actor who plays Agent Coulson, who died in the 2011 Joss Whedon comic The Avengers, is responding to questions about the plot twist.

Clark Gregg told ScreenCrush the decision came down to Marvel’s thinking that “they never depend on some tacit understanding that they can do anything. It’s got to make the fans go squee.”

He thinks that when people see Agent Coulson’s storyline this fall, “they will be as satisfied as this fanboy was,” referring to himself.

When asked what it felt like to bring the character to TV, Gregg went into a little more detail. “I didn’t feel like he had an arc, but in The Avengers I felt like all of a sudden, one was there. We really saw that he had been the one who really shepherded these people – he was the one who knew them all. The only one he hadn’t met was the one he was most obsessed with, Captain America, and suddenly when they’re squabbling and he’s the one who has to go in there, all of a sudden he does have a journey. These movies have led him to this point, and I think there’s going to be what you call reverse-engineering a little bit in the pilot and then we’ll start to understand more about both who he is going forward and perhaps who he was before.”

No release date for The Avengers television show Agents of SHIELD has been set yet, but ABC is expected to premiere the half-hour, weekly show in the fall. Thanks, ScreenCrush.