In Thunderbolts*, Lewis Pullman's Bob (aka The Sentry, aka The Void) has the power to trap people in their most traumatic memories, but not everyone's nightmares were included in the final cut of the MCU film.
Director Jake Schreier spoke recently about some scrapped ideas, including an unexpected shame room for Sebastian Stan's Bucky.
"We had Alexei in the gulag, I think, having been thrown in there. I believe Ghost's was about her time in the orphanage, and being this girl that no one wanted to be around – to be able to be invisible and see the way that you're perceived and no one wanting to associate with you felt very sad," he revealed during an interview with Variety.
In the movie, we do get to see Yelena Belova's (Florence Pugh) first test for the Red Room, John Walker's (Wyatt Russell) troubling attitude towards his wife and son, and even Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) witnessing her father's murder as a young girl.
Bucky's shame room, however, was left out of the mix. Fans know quite a lot about his traumatic past as the Winter Soldier, but one of the team's ideas would have surprised everyone.
"We had a lot of different Bucky ones. We always wanted to do something a little less than the expected idea. There's some very obvious things for Bucky, but I think at one point, [screenwriter] Joanna [Calo] had written something around some shameful moment in Boy Scout camp," Schreier explained, although he admitted he wasn't sure that "that would have really been the right path for it."
"That's the nice thing with working with these actors," he continued, "they're such invested, caring guardians of their characters and their arcs that they'll let you know something feels false or not right to them."
In the interview, the director also explained why some shame rooms were included and others weren't – it just had to make sense for the story.
"There was a time when the finale became an escape through all of their shame rooms, and I think that would have been very fun. But something Joanna really spoke up for was needing to have a Big Bad moment before they got out of the Void. And if it’s going to lead to the heart of the Void, then it felt like it was more important to take a journey through Bob’s shame rooms – as much as I am very sad not to have gotten to get in every character’s past," he explained.
Thunderbolts* (aka The New Avengers) is now out in cinemas. For more, read our Thunderbolts review, and check out our guide to the other upcoming Marvel movies in 2025 and beyond.
