An almost four-minute-trailer for “Thunderbolts*” — the 36th movie in the MCU is out. I felt so many films since 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” have left me feeling underwhelmed or confused and weary of bad effects and loudness over story. This one looks like fun and I do like looking at a fresh new team.
Not much is out on the plot. In the press email from Disney, the movie is described as “an irreverent team-up featuring depressed assassin Yelena Belova alongside the MCU’s least anticipated band of misfits.”
While homework for this film would include the Captain America movies, “Ant-Man and the Wasp” and “Black Widow” and the series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” and “Hawkeye,” it seemed easy for me to get into the swing of things with the cast and characters.
I got to chat really quickly with Hannah John-Kamen who plays Ava Starr aka Ghost in the movie. Ghost has the power to phase shift and can pass through matter. Audiences met her in 2018’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” and she had an ax to grind against Hank Pym and S.H.I.E.L.D. She was in both physical and emotional pain. I asked her if Ghost would still be angst-ridden this time around.
Would she find even a pocket of joy? “So much joy,” she said laughingly as she stood beside director Jake Schreier.
“The last time you saw her, she was volcanic. She was flickering to death and she was in pain. I would describe her as an open nerve. She was dealing with this battle. You found her in this coping mechanism of constant survival whereas now she has control of that. With that, there’s a calm, and there’s a decisiveness, and there’s a powerful breath and beat in that. So yes, you’ll see a different Ghost.”
To which Schreier added, “joy and humor.”
I didn’t like the way they wrote Florence Pugh’s character, Jean Tatlock, in the Oscar winning “Oppenheimer.” A psychoanalyst with radical political views is reduced to being a tragic mistress.
An actress with so much talent playing someone so intellectually fascinating and getting this I felt was pretty criminal. So it’s good to have her back again as Yelena Belova, after playing her in the movie “Black Widow” and the series “Hawkeye.”
Yelena is the adoptive sister of Natasha Romanoff and is a Red Room operative. She said she liked the idea of working with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who plays Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (and a CIA Director who makes me question where her allegiances really lie).
“I get to work with Julia again and I get to learn from her again and I get to talk to her about random s**t again, it just makes me feel very, very happy.”
Rounding out the cast are Geraldine Viswanathan, Lewis Pullman, Wyatt Russell, Julia Sebastian Stan and David Harbour. More on the men in the cast in an upcoming feature.
“Thunderbolts*” is set for a May 2025 release.
Be the first to comment