Dhanush inspired combat scenes in ‘Marvel’ movies: Russo Brothers

The director-duo is ready to present Dhanush as a deadly assassin in Netflix’s ‘The Gray Man’

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo’s love for India and Indian talent is no secret. The filmmakers - Joe in particular - have spoken about how they’d watch videos of Indian fan reactions to ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ to motivate themselves for ‘Avengers: Endgame’, have credited Rajinikanth films as being an inspiration and have cast Priyanka Chopra in their upcoming ‘Prime Video’ series ‘Citadel’. But first, they will present Dhanush as a deadly assassin in perhaps the biggest film of his career, Netflix’s ‘The Gray Man’.

During a roundtable interaction ahead of the film’s release on July 22 the brothers are in India to promote the actionthriller - Joe was quoted by a leading daily as saying that he first caught notice of Dhanush when they were working on the ‘Marvel’ movies.

“It was interesting that while we were working on the ‘Marvel’ movies, we would research action sequences from other films as inspiration and look for ideas. We have a very good stunt team that we have worked with for years and everyone brings ideas to the table. A lot of times, we’d look at clips from other movies. I noticed that we would see a lot of clips of Dhanush in action,” he said.

Joe added, “After seeing two or three clips, I was like ‘Who is this?’ That’s how we came to know

Dhanush and it was while working on ‘Marvel’ films. Dhanush inspired a couple of sequences and hand-tohand combat scenes in those movies.”

The Russo brothers have directed four films in MCU; in addition to the last two ‘Avengers’ films, they helmed ‘Captain America: Winter Soldier’ and ‘Captain America: Civil War’. They followed their ‘Marvel’ stint up with a passion project, ‘Cherry’, which debuted on ‘Apple TV+’ to mixed reviews. ‘The Gray Man’ is their return to big-budget filmmaking and has been designed as a possible franchise-starter for ‘Netflix’.

Joe said that he had no idea if Dhanush would even be interested in the film and expressed gratitude on behalf of both his brother and himself that he did. In the film, Dhanush plays an assassin Avik San, who is summoned to capture Ryan Gosling’s titular character. At one point, Chris Evans’ villainous Lloyd Hansen describes him as his ‘Tamil *friend’.

Joe recently said that he first caught notice of Dhanush when they were working on the ‘Marvel’ movies