Thunderbolts* screenwriter Eric Pearson has revealed that Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) originally had a much bigger role in the Marvel movie – and he didn't know that had been changed until he saw an early cut of the film for the first time. Warning: there are Thunderbolts* spoilers ahead!
If you're still here, you'll know that the former Red Room assassin, who made her MCU debut in 2021's Black Widow, is killed off pretty swiftly in Thunderbolts*, despite being teased as a member of the titular group.
In one of the film's early scenes, several of the Thunderbolts find themselves trapped in a vault after being lured there by Val (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) shoots Taskmaster in the head.
"It was decided after my work," Pearson 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…"
Pearson revealed that in the final draft of his script, Taskmaster survived for the whole movie and was the center of "a pretty big subplot." This draft involved Taskmaster bonding with Ava Starr, AKA Ghost, "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.'"
Ghost was introduced in 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp with an unstable molecular condition as a result of an experiment gone wrong, which allows her to phase through solid objects. She was captured by SHIELD and controlled by the organization in a similar way to Taskmaster's manipulation by her father, Dreykov.
"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," Pearson added.
"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!'"
Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier thought Taskmaster's death was a necessary part of the film, however. "Obviously, it's a big decision," he told GamesRadar+. "We felt like a movie like this needed something like that, where you're like, 'Okay, if they'll do that, they could do anything,' you know, and you don't really know exactly where the thing is going to go. It needed a bit of shock or surprise."
Thunderbolts* is out now. For more on the movie, check out our verdict in our Thunderbolts* review, or get up to speed with our guide to the Thunderbolts* post-credits scenes.
