It’s a film 19 years in the making and the capstone to a largely unexpected shared cinematic universe. At a recent press day for Glass, Nerdist‘s Coy Jandreau sat down with director M. Night Shyamalan and stars James McAvoy and Samuel L. Jackson about the highly anticipated sequel, the movie’s comic book parallels and the surprising way in which McAvoy found out that he was going to be in the followup to Unbreakable.

During the chat Charles Xavier himself revealed that during the first few weeks of shooting Split he had no idea that the film was in the same universe as Unbreakable. Rather, he thought that Shyamalan was strangely stuck in the past as the director kept bringing up his cult classic comic book film. Samuel L. Jackson, on the other hand, was always ready to return to Elijah Glass, the role that he brought to life in the original, as he spoke about the fact that Shyamalan always intended for the film to launch a trilogy.

Coy also brought an interesting observation to Shyamalan that the director was incredibly taken with as he highlighted some of the parallels between the three films in the trilogy and different comic book eras. Jandreau broke down how he thought Unbreakable resembled the Silver Age, Split the Golden Age, and Glass the Modern era of self-referential comics. It’s clear that Shyamalan was excited by this as he talked about how steeped in comic book culture he’d been during the making of the most recent addition to the series. No matter how you feel about the controversial third entry, the comic book influence can definitely be felt all over Glass which is out in theaters nationwide now.

Images: Universal Pictures