The director of Thunderbolts* — now officially renamed The New Avengers — has explained why one character in particular had to die early on in the movie, and how conversations with the actor who played the character went.
Warning! Spoilers for Thunderbolts* / The New Avengers follow:
Early in Thunderbolts* / The New Avengers, Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) is killed by Ava Starr / Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), unceremoniously shot in the head as the assassins come to blows within a covert O.X.E. facility. Taskmaster dies in her first and only scene in the movie.
While Marvel’s Thunderbolts* promos had inserted Taskmaster into shots later on in the movie to make it look like the character would make it at least a decent chunk of the way through, her fate had been called into question when the character appeared to be removed from certain shots in pre-release trailers.
Making matters even more obvious, Kurylenko was the only member of the Thunderbolts* not to appear in Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday cast reveal. So, for MCU fans who were paying attention, Taskmaster’s death wasn’t exactly a surprise. But for many it will have come as a shock, especially so early in the film.
So, why did Taskmaster have to die? In an interview with The New York Times, director Jake Schreier said the idea came about as a result of the movie feeling “a little bloodless,” and a desire to have a “real tension” between characters who were capable of killing people.
“That was a tough one because it’s a character that matters to a lot of people and we don’t want to take that lightly,” Schreier said.
“That idea came after the strike when it just felt like the movie at that point was a little bloodless. It’s not rated R, but if we were trying to tell a story that had real tension about people who killed people for a living, you needed to depict that in a way. Obviously, we could have introduced a new character and then gotten rid of them, but then it wouldn’t have the resonance or potentially the shock of doing it to Taskmaster.”
Schreier admitted it wasn’t easy to tell Olga Kurylenko, who played Taskmaster in Black Widow, that she’s return for Thunderbolts* only to be killed off early on.
“It’s like in sports: players want to play,” Schreier said. “Olga’s a great actress and of course that’s a hard conversation to have, but she was an absolute pro about it and willing to show up, and I’m very grateful for that.”
Earlier this month, Schreier told Entertainment Weekly that the team behind Thunderbolts* felt they needed to kill Taskmaster early “so that you didn’t really know who was going to make it.”
“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,” Schreier added.
“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.
“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.”
According to the film’s co-writer Eric Pearson, Taskmaster was originally intended to have a much bigger part in the movie, and she was meant to have an important connection to Ghost.
“That’s one of the biggest changes from my final draft, because in the last version that I did, [Taskmaster] lived out the whole movie and there was a pretty big subplot of her and Ava connecting as two characters that were raised in labs and being controlled by other people,” Pearson told IGN.
So, that’s that for Taskmaster, but of course the other Thunderbolts*, that is, The New Avengers, live on, and will appear in Avengers: Doomsday alongside, or potentially in conflict with, the (true?) Avengers. Check out IGN’s Thunderbolts Ending Explained: What Happens in the Post-Credits and How Does It Affect the MCU? for more.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
