BLACK WIDOW
Scarlett Johansson returns to show there’s life in natasha yet…
DIRECTOR CATE SHORTLAND STARRING SCARLETT JOHANSSON, FLORENCE PUGH, RACHEL WEISZ, DAVID HARBOUR ETA 1 MAY 2020
You might have thought that we had seen the last of Natasha Romanoff given her heroic self-sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame. Yet no one stays dead in the MCU, as proved by the standalone Black Widow movie that will kick off Marvel’s Phase 4 roster next spring.
As the movie takes place between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, no infinity stone was needed to bring Scarlett Johansson’s leather-clad assassin back to life. What was required, though, was a female director (Australia’s Cate Shortland), a multinational cast and a commitment to bring Natasha’s complicated backstory to the screen. “What drew me to the story is she has so many secrets and so much vulnerability,” Shortland reveals. “In this film we get to understand her past and she gets to put all the pieces of herself back together and come out a whole person.”
One of those pieces involves Budapest, a place that has been mentioned more than once since ScarJo made her MCU debut back in 2010’s Iron Man 2. Footage unveiled at Comic-Con in July showed Natasha returning to the Hungarian capital to go mano a mano with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), a fellow graduate of the Red Room training facility she teasingly calls “sis”. “There is a lot of history,” reveals Pugh, no stranger to fisticuffs thanks to Fighting With My Family. “They are broken and they’re hurt and they know everything about each other. They are both products of the same programme and they face the same problems. How they get up and fix themselves is what this movie’s about.”
Johansson herself admits it is “a little bit scary not having the cushion of my fellow Avengers around”. Yet she has plenty of back-up regardless, with Rachel Weisz appearing as Natasha’s long-time rival Melina Vostokoff and Stranger Things’ David Harbour sporting a Cap-style shield in his role as the Red Guardian. “I get to play Natasha as a fully realised woman, in all her many facets,” says ScarJo. “I don’t think I could have played this iteration 10 years ago.” Weisz, meanwhile, is just as delighted to be part of the film, which will also feature the classic Marvel baddie the Taskmaster. “There is nothing more exciting and escapist than the mythology of the Marvel universe,” gushes Weisz. “I’m thrilled to be part of the family.”