To channel her inner daredevil, Florence Pugh jumped off the second-tallest skyscraper in the world for Thunderbolts*.
“I love heights,” Pugh says in a new Marvel video that explains the death-defying stunt. To start the movie with a bang, Pugh dove off the Merdeka 118, a 2,227-foot tower in Kuala Lumpur. At first, director Jake Schreier received pushback for the stunt from Disney, which to him was “a very reasonable thing to say.” However, Pugh’s insistence on completing the jump led the studio to approve the scene.
If jumping off a skyscraper wasn’t enough adrenaline, how about blowing up a building? The explosion scene, which is prominently featured in the Thunderbolts trailer, was filmed on the same day as the epic leap.
“You do realize neither of us are ever going to have a day like this ever again in our careers?” Pugh joked to Schreier.
Pugh headlines Thunderbolts*, the upcoming Marvel Studios movie set to kick off the summer blockbuster season. Pugh’s Yelena Belova is one of the antiheroes forced to team up after becoming trapped in a death-defying situation by Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Joining Pugh on the team are Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, David Harbour as Red Guardian, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost, Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster, and Wyatt Russell as John Walker.
Lewis Pullman as Bob/Sentry/The Void and Geraldine Viswanathan as Mel also star. Schreier directs from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo.
Much of the Thunderbolts* cast has already been confirmed for Avengers: Doomsday, including Pugh, Stan, Harbour, John-Kamen, Russell, and Pullman.
Marvel Studios will release Thunderbolts* in theaters on May 2.