Some of blood spilled on the Thunderbolts* set wasn’t actually fake.
Marvel’s newest team-up movie centers on a dysfunctional group of antiheroes and villains, so it’s no surprise that Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), U.S. Agent/John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) get beat up. A lot.
But when the cast gathered for Entertainment Weekly‘s Around the Table, they revealed some gnarly on-set dangers that led to a real hospital trip and staples in one of their heads … as well as a near-miss brush with scorpions. And Pugh remembers the scorpions most of all since one of them was literally climbing up her leg, and she had no idea at the time.
“We’re in the desert laying down on the floor filming a scene, and as we get up, someone just comes and pats my leg,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ And they’re like, ‘There was a scorpion on your leg.’ Where we were lying down, we were on a scorpion’s home.”
As John-Kamen laughs about how they were all unwittingly laying on a scorpion nest, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays the scheming Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, and Geraldine Viswanathan, who plays her assistant Mel, are both shocked. “I did not know this,” Louis-Dreyfus says. “That’s really freaky. That’s awful.”
“We were laying down, and we got up, and we had to have umbrellas because we it was so hot and we were in the desert,” Pugh continues. “We were waiting to do the reset, and then we were going to get back down on the floor, and someone came and patted my leg. Thank god I was wearing those combat boots, because there was a scorpion on my combat boot climbing up my leg. And then we were like, ‘No way, we were laying down there!'”
But they weren’t out of the danger just yet. “And then they were like, ‘Reset, reset, get back down there,'” John-Kamen remembers.
Pugh laughs as she adds, “They were like, ‘The scorpions are gone.’ And we were like, ‘But what about the other ones?!'”
While they didn’t get stung by the scorpions during that scene, one of them didn’t make it out unscathed from another scene. “I split my head open,” Russell reveals. “That was a blast.”
Louis-Dreyfus did know about this on-set mishap. “You got staples in your head,” she says to Russell.
Harbour remembers that day on set clearly, because he noticed how risky the scene was as they were filming. “I kept saying, ‘Guys, this is really dangerous because we’re running run in front of this little two-by-four that sticks out right here,'” Harbour says. “‘We have to duck into it. It’s really dangerous, can we not do this?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, let’s just go one more time.’ And we came in, and I went through, and then Wyatt, and then I just heard, ‘Oh!’ And he went down on the ground. I remember I looked over and blood was just spewing everywhere.”
But it’s as if Russell had the super solider serum himself, because John-Kamen reveals that he was back on set the next day, ready to film with staples in his head.
“Yeah, went to the hospital, stapled me up,” Russell reveals.
“You don’t even have a scar,” Louis-Dreyfus tells him, but he corrects her.
Marvel Studios
Wyatt Russell in ‘Thunderbolts’
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“Yeah, in my hairline,” Russell says. “Three inches lower and I would have been the scar guy for the rest of my life. A lot of roles with cool scars in them. Would have been really good for the career. But that was fun.”
Thankfully, no more on-set injuries happened throughout the course of filming. But there were plenty of opportunities with all of the inventive action sequences they shot for the movie. “Lots of adrenaline, running through holes that were too tight for us to run through,” Pugh says.
Harbour especially remembers having to run full speed downstairs right behind Pugh, and he was worried about falling on her if something went wrong. And something did go wrong … for Pugh, at least, whose batons kept getting caught on the concrete ledge above her, yanking her backward every time. “We’re unhinged!” Pugh says with a laugh.
Thunderbolts* is now playing in theaters. Watch our full interview with the cast in the video above.
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