Four years after first debuting as Yelena Belova in Black Widow, Florence Pugh is set to make her return in Thunderbolts*. In a recent interview with the rest of the film’s cast and creative team, Pugh told Empire how different the movie feels than most Marvel fare.
“It ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes,” she said.
Jake Schreier, who directed the film and also directed the A24-produced Netflix series Beef, was told to make the movie “something different.”
“There’s a certain amount of that Beef tone in it, that does feel different. There’s an emotional darkness that we brought to this that is resonant, but doesn’t come at the expense of comedy,” he explained.
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Thunderbolts follows a group of antiheroes, many of whom have appeared in some other Marvel project, as they unite to go on a mission for the U.S. government. It’s a little bit like the Marvel version of The Suicide Squad. In addition to Pugh, the movie also stars Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen, and Olga Kurylenko, as well as Lewis Pullman, who plays a new character named Bob.
“Yelena sees parts of herself in him,” Pugh said of her character’s relationship with Pullman’s. “She’s always been someone that wants to look after people. She has a sweet spot for him, and essentially likes looking after him because he’s useless. He’s absolutely useless.”
While Marvel movies have been compared to ’70s conspiracy thrillers in the past, this might be the first time that anyone has compared one to an A24 movie. We’ll see whether the comparison is apt when the movie hits theaters on May 2.