This story contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*.
The group of antiheroes, contract killers, and straight-up villains that make up Thunderbolts* has a body count that’s impossible to track, so it should come as no surprise that one of them doesn’t make it out of the movie alive. But the way in which Marvel’s latest film wastes no time in killing one of its main characters has left audiences gasping — and director Jake Schreier tells Entertainment Weekly that was the whole point.
Taskmaster, we hardly knew you. Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko), the tragic, mind-controlled villain from Black Widow, was in every Thunderbolts* trailer and poster, seemingly touted as one of the team members. But in her very first scene in the movie, she’s unceremoniously shot in the head by Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen). It’s a brutal, quick kill, and done with no remorse. Ghost was just fulfilling her latest contract from Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), unaware that it was all a ploy to get her, Taskmaster, U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) to kill each other, thereby erasing all evidence of Val’s illegal shadow ops and clearing her of any wrongdoing for her ongoing impeachment trial.
While Yelena figured out the scheme in time to save herself and the others, it was too late for Taskmaster, who already paid the ultimate price — a rarity in a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. She also doesn’t live long enough to find redemption or become one of the New Avengers team members, and only one quick moment later in the movie sees Yelena and Ghost barely acknowledging her fate. And that’s because her death was added to the script later, according to the director.
Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Studios
Olga Kurylenko in ‘Thunderbolts*’
“Coming out of the strike, we were about to shoot, and we got shut down, and it gave us some time to step back from the movie,” Schreier tells EW. “And when we all got back in the room, once the strike was over, and we were thinking about how to improve it, it really felt like the movie seemed just a little bloodless.”
While Thunderbolts* was never going to be R-rated, Schreier still wanted to make it feel like any of the characters could die at any moment, especially considering these are all killers and former (maybe still current?) villains.
“For who these characters are, it should live up to those movies that have attention to ’em, where you really don’t know who’s going to survive it,” Schreier says. “I know that’s tricky in today’s era where things get out before movies, but within the context of the film, it felt like we needed to take a swing like that so that you didn’t really know who was going to make it, and also so that it was clear that it could have been any one of them.”
The speed with which Taskmaster is killed in the movie was also by design to make it as shocking as possible for viewers (mission: accomplished).
“The decision to do it when we did it, we went through a lot of different versions of that, and we thought very carefully about it,” the director explains. “And it felt like, while it would’ve been very nice — and Olga is a wonderful actress — to have her on the team for longer, that death would’ve kind of reverberated a lot harder and made it harder to find our tonal balance if it had happened later in the film.”
He continues, “And it would’ve occupied such a kind of more emotional space that would’ve stepped on what we really need to be building. And we have so little narrative real estate to do it, which is the connection between Yelena and Bob [Lewis Pullman], and the movie is really going to hinge on that. And so in order to keep our tone and to build that team together, it actually felt best, even if it feels a little cold-blooded, to have that happen early.”
Courtesy of Marvel Studios
John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour) in ‘Thunderbolts*’
The director also wanted to clarify that, despite their powers and skills, none of these characters are unkillable. “I think it’s good to give the audience a reminder of that,” he says.
While it seems as if Taskmaster’s death has no immediate consequences, Schreier argues that it has a greater impact by driving the rest of the story forward.
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“As Yelena says later in the movie, ‘She had a tough life. She killed a lot of people, and then she got killed, just like us someday,'” he says. “And I think that her character lives on in the movie in the way they think about that, and what they’ve done, and what it means to be just sort of blithely going around doing what one is instructed to do, ordered to do, and existing kind of in this darker isolated place.”
Marvel Entertainment/Youtube
The Void (Lewis Pullman) in ‘Thunderbolts*’
Marvel doesn’t kill very often, but the director says there was no pushback from the comic giant on killing Taskmaster so soon into the movie.
“This movie was made very collaboratively,” Schreier says. “And [Marvel Studios head] Kevin [Feige] is so good at the thing that I knew going in from [MCU’s Spider-Man trilogy director] Jon Watts, my roommate in college — they never stop trying to make it better. And every meeting you come into, Kevin will say, ‘There’s a lot of good stuff in here, some things we can improve, let’s talk about it,’ and that doesn’t stop.”
In fact, Schreier adds, they only finished Thunderbolts* “maybe two and a half weeks ago,” working to make it better right up until the last second before its release. “What lines stay in, what go out,” he says. “There’s always an attitude of, what can we make better? How can we push until it’s pencils down?”
You can see the final product — Taskmaster’s death included — now that Thunderbolts* (a.k.a. New Avengers) is playing in theaters.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
