Florence Pugh, ‘Thunderbolts*’ director praise Marvel for making mental health story

This article contains spoilers about Thunderbolts*.

It’s not lost on Thunderbolts* star Florence Pugh that she’s in a major Marvel movie that’s more about depression and mental health than battling some big comic book villain.

Sure, Thunderbolts* also features the titular dysfunctional team of antiheroes in a big fight against the unstable, Superman-like Sentry/Void a.k.a. “Bob” (Lewis Pullman). But that conflict feels more like a sidenote in the latest MCU movie, as Yelena Belova (Pugh), Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), U.S. Agent/John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (David Harbour), and Ava Starr/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) end up comforting Bob in the end, finishing the high-stakes fight by giving the struggling man a hug rather than letting him punch his Void alter ego into submission. It’s a powerful, emotional, and surprisingly relatable story for larger-than-life comic book characters.

“Oh my God, it’s massive,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “It’s a huge deal. It’s a huge deal that that theme was made with a Marvel budget, and they cared enough about it to make it the main event. And that is so important, so important for everybody right now.”

Pugh felt similarly in her MCU debut, 2021’s Black Widow. “It was the story of those girls and those women and the control that they were put under, that really made me want to be a part of that story,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, loads of girls are going to go and watch this movie and they’re going to be educated and inspired, and that’s so cool.’ And I feel the same with this. So many people, adults and children, are going to watch this, and if they need it, they’re going to see themselves or their friends or their partners in it, and it’s so wonderful to be able to make a movie for the masses that you know is going to be helpful.”

When Thunderbolts* director Jake Schreier first signed on to the project, he knew he wanted to make a very different kind of Marvel movie. He already had experience infusing a story about characters’ internal struggles with dark comedy after executive producing and directing season 1 of Netflix’s Beef (starring Steven Yeun, who was previously attached to star in Thunderbolts* in an unspecified role that was likely Bob).

“I found out that I got the job, I think it was the last week we were shooting Beef, and I would show [Marvel Studios head] Kevin [Feige] clips of the show before it came out and he loved it,” Schreier tells EW. “And then when it came out, he was really into it. And eventually we brought in Lee Sung Jin, who created [Beef], and is a friend of mine, to do multiple drafts of this script.”

After bringing in Joanna Calo, who also worked on Beef and co-created The Bear (another award-winning series about mental health), as well as “a lot of the collaborators from Beef,” Schreier began to feel as if the show was a surprising “recipe or blueprint” for how Thunderbolts* deals with the declining mental health of Marvel’s rejects.

“These themes are not niche anymore; that we all struggle with this and that they were universal ideas,” Schreier says. “And even if it felt scary for a big Netflix show or a Marvel movie to take that on, the audience is out there, and these aren’t things that we push away so much. They’re things that everyone confronts.”

Having just made (and won an Emmy for) Beef, Schreier knew he could balance that heavier story with humor and action. “You didn’t have to sacrifice those things just to get to a deeper character level,” he says. “It’s a bigger scale, for sure, the action’s on a much bigger scale and it’s on a bigger stage, but I think we really believed in that, and the support was wonderful. I mean, Kevin said from the moment I got the job, ‘Make it different, do something with it.'”

But on the flip side, the director never wanted to use the movie to deliver any singular message about mental health. “Certainly I have my own connection to what we’re exploring,” he says. “I think there are people involved, and there are friends of mine, that I’m kind of using as a North Star for who Bob is, and the last thing I would want is for people to come and watch the movie and feel like we reduced those ideas, or we were preaching at anyone. The older I get, I’m much less interested in conveying any particular message in a film as much as exploring ideas.”

The actors and director knew they were making a poignant movie through a Marvel lens, but they had no idea how impactful audiences would find it. “It’s fun to talk to people about it — it seems like this side of it is really connecting, but we didn’t really know that,” Schreier says. “The idea was not to be pre-scripted. It was just to find a way to tell an internal story that made sense for a group of antiheroes and people who had really been through it.”

Pugh says she was struck by something Harbour brought up during the film’s press cycle. “David’s been saying that the enemy in this, it’s so related to loneliness and being trapped inside your phone and being trapped in isolation, and how the key and the last piece of the puzzle is about connection and being with people,” she says.

“We all know that when you’re in that state of mind, you just feel smaller and smaller and feel more and more helpless,” she adds. “And that is such an element in this storyline, these people that are just so trapped in their inner turmoil that they don’t have the confidence or the strength to open up and speak. And the real message is we have to be together. We have to connect, we have to help each other. We have to be humans and actually care, and love, and look after each other. And that is the key.”

It’s something everyone can relate to, she adds. “Even people with superpowers — or not, Yelena doesn’t have superpowers. She just knows her way around a knife.”

That’s why Pugh fought so hard to keep the opening scene in the film, where Yelena steps off the second-tallest building in the world as a voiceover reveals the depths of her depression. A few, long seconds later, she’s revealed to have a parachute on her back, but she continues to fight her way into a lab as if she’s going through the motions, perhaps as if she hopes to lose.

“We had these discussions of we want our own sort of weird Thunderbolts* version of a Bond or Mission: Impossible opening, but for our movie, that means that it should be a stunt but it needs to dovetail with the emotion that we’re going to be talking about in the movie,” Schreier says. “It’s the idea of finding a young woman in a low place where you might imagine for a second that it’s suicide, but then actually is this kind of disaffected bored version of a Bond stunt where she can pull off this stuff with no regard for her own safety.”

The director remembers asking Pugh how she felt about heights when the idea for the opening stunt came about. “I sent her the script and she’s like, ‘I love heights. What are we doing?'” Schreier says. “I was like, ‘Well, we can’t ask you to do this, but if you would like to do it…’ And then she really took it upon herself. She would not take no for an answer with the studio.”

“Well, I was afraid,” Pugh clarifies with a laugh. “Hang on, hang on. I’m not totally crazy. I’m like semi crazy. I love the idea that somewhere someone’s saying, ‘Yeah, she wasn’t afraid of that height.’ No, I was. I like heights. I like jumping off things. This was obviously a completely different ballgame.”

Still, she insisted on not only doing that stunt herself, but also keeping the sequence in the movie when it was cut from the script during development.

“It was just such a powerful way to start a movie because when I read it, it read alongside with the voiceovers, and it really did feel, when you are on the first page, she’s going to jump off a building because she doesn’t want to be there anymore,” Pugh says. “And it was such a dark and heavy way to start a movie about mental health. And it was just so shocking. It got taken out later on down the line, because they obviously started looking into insuring me, and it just wasn’t going to happen.”

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Pugh remembers being “furious.” ”

“I was just like, ‘This is such a quick way to explain to the audience who she is and how she’s feeling,'” she explains. “And then I complained a lot.”

The actor is proud of how much her complaining started conversations about the rest of the scene, right down to the character’s wardrobe. “She’s at a state in her life where she really is asking the universe to remove her, and so what does that mean?” Pugh says. “I got really involved in, well, if she’s really asking for the universe to remove her, she wouldn’t be wearing her supersuit. She’d be wearing a tracksuit that isn’t protecting her in any way.”

That also trickled down into her performance and the stunt choreography. “She’s going to be fighting as if she’s just doing the moves, but she’s hoping that someone is quicker than her and is just going to quickly finish it,” Pugh says. “She’s putting herself in very vulnerable situations in the hope that it will naturally just happen. And that was just such an interesting, important way to start the movie. So yeah, I was sassy Karen, as I’ve been saying.”

Thunderbolts* is now playing in theaters.