Ever since the first Thunderbolts* trailer came out, sharp-eyed Marvel Cinematic Universe fans have been theorizing about one particular gap between the cast list and the footage released. Black Widow villain Antonia Dreykov, aka Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), appears on the movie’s poster and marketing, but is noticeably absent from other scenes and shots in the promotional material, leading to speculation that her role in the movie is fairly minimal. That wound up being true — though original Thunderbolts* screenwriter Eric Pearson (Black Widow, Fantastic Four: First Steps) tells Polygon he wrote a much more involved arc for her.
He also says he only found out how radically her role had been altered when he was sitting in an early screening, watching the movie, which “shocked the hell” out of him.
[Ed. note: Significant spoilers ahead about Taskmaster’s situation in Thunderbolts*.]
Image: Marvel Studios via Everett Collection
Black Widow sets up Antonia as the cyborg-ized, mind-controlled daughter and ultimate weapon of Dreykov (Ray Winstone), the general behind both the Soviet version of the super-soldier-serum project that produced Red Guardian (David Harbour) and the torturous Red Room program that turned Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and her sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) into super-assassins. By the end of Black Widow, Dreykov is dead, which leaves Antonia to put her own super-assassin skills (and ability to mimic anyone’s fighting style) to more profitable work, serving as a mercenary for CIA director and mega-schemer Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
When Valentina faces impeachment and possible arrest for her many crimes early in Thunderbolts*, she tries to cover her tracks by sending all her operatives to a high-security vault at the same time with different information and assassination assignments, hoping they’ll wipe each other out. Most of her mercs — Yelena (from Black Widow and Hawkeye), John Walker/US Agent (Wyatt Russell) from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from Ant Man and The Wasp — all survive the group’s first confrontation. Antonia doesn’t. Ghost guns her down. There are no surprise reveals where she survived that encounter, at least not in this movie — she appears to die, and shortly after that, to be incinerated.
All of which came as a complete surprise to Pearson. “It was decided after my work,” he told Polygon. “When I sat down to watch the first cut, one thing was totally different and shocked the hell out of me, and it was that. Everything else, I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s the movie that I wrote!’ But that decision…”
As far as why Taskmaster was removed from the movie, Pearson says he doesn’t know: “You’d have to ask [director] Jake Schreier or [Marvel Studios president] Kevin [Feige] or [co-credited screenwriter] Joanna [Calo], maybe. But if I were to guess, it would be to get the reaction that I had as an audience member, like, ‘Whoa, we’re upping the stakes, we’re doing something drastic really fast, and we’re putting everybody on edge.’”
Pearson says that in the final draft of his script, Antonia/Taskmaster survives for the entire movie, and was the center of “a pretty big subplot.” His script had Taskmaster bonding with Ava, who, as we learned in Ant-Man and the Wasp, gained quantum-shifting powers in a lab accident that killed her parents, and was subsequently found by SHIELD, raised in a lab, and trained as a weapon. Pearson felt they’d have a lot in common “as people who’d grown up in labs and been controlled that way.
“And Ava, having won her autonomy earlier in the chronology than Taskmaster, was kind of big-sistering her a little bit, in a way of ‘how to break free and be your own person,’” Pearson says.
He also feels that Taskmaster’s presence helped rein in some of the other characters’ tendency for self-pity: “I mean, everyone in there has suffered a ton of tragedy,” he says. “But she was kind of the ultimate tragedy. In the old tragedy rankings, she was at the top, and the other, bigger personalities — no one could get out of line, because no one could say ‘I had it worse than you.’”
His version of Taskmaster also enabled a running joke about her tendency to forget she’d moved past trying to assassinate John Walker, and go after him again. “On the comedy side, she was struggling with her own memory-loss stuff, and there was a gag where she just kept restarting the fight and forgetting that they had made up and become friends.” he says.
“They would be discussing the plan of how to get out [of the vault], and she’d just go after him again, and they’d all have to pig-pile on each other, and pull her off, and be like, ‘No, we know each other! We’ve had this conversation before!’”
Pearson does wonder if one reason Antonia’s plotlines were cut short was because that gag felt redundant with the movie’s other big friend-turned-foe plotline. “That could contribute as another reason why they chose to bring her out of the movie,” he says. “Bob was obviously having memory issues as a big part of his character.”
Comic book stories being what they are, there’s always the chance Taskmaster could come back at some point, with a reveal about how she survived that shot to the face: Her extremely high-tech armor is, after all, part of her power set, and we only see the bullet hole in her mask, not in her head. It seems unlikely that Marvel Studios would bother with a character they killed so offhandedly and abruptly — but hey, Guardians of the Galaxy’s Gamora returned from the dead (via time-loop shenanigans), and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki has “died” three times (and became a cosmic tree once), yet he’s still apparently coming back for Avengers: Doomsday. So it’s always possible she could still show up to punch Walker in the face a few more times. He deserves it.
Thunderbolts* is in theaters now.
