Cobie Smulders has the inside track on the role of SHIELD agent Maria Hill in Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie. The usually reliable Deadline, which has very strong lines of communications into the Whedonverse, reports that Smulders, who plays Robin Scherbatsky on the sitcom How I Met Your Mother “is closing in” on the Avengers role, which the site identified as that of Maria Hill, who became interim director of SHIELD and played a key role in Marvel’s Civil War narrative in which she is one of the leading enforcers of the Superhuman Registration Act, though to her credit she refuses to nuke an island where the Avengers had gathered.

A number of actresses including V’s Morena Baccarin, Jessica Lucas, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were in the running for the role, which reportedly includes an option for 9 films (see “V Star Could Be Headed for Avengers”), an indication that Marvel Studios is planning to create an interrelated series of movies that parallels to some degree at least the comic book tapestry known as the Marvel Universe. The Avengers, which is slated for a release on May 4th, 2012, is a superhero ensemble film that will bring together Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth as Thor, Chris Evans as Captain America, Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow, Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, Tom Huddleston as Loki, and Clark Gregg as SHIELD agent Phil Coulson. Adding the Maria Hill character gives the male-dominated ensemble at least the perception of some sort of gender balance.

While V star Morena Baccarin has worked with Whedon on the Firefly TV series and the subsequent Serenity movie, Smulders, whose resemblance to Maria Hill as depicted in the comics is striking, was, according to Deadline, Whedon’s choice to play Wonder Woman, when he was developing that project for Warner Bros. Smulder’s character on How I Met Your Mother, Robin Schebatsky began her career as a teen model and Canadian bubblegum pop star known as Robin Sparkles. Two music videos featuring the Robin Sparkles character, “Let’s Go to the Mall,” and “Sandcastles in the Sand” are quite hilarious and have received heavy views on YouTube.