Florence is fighting fit as a comic book killer
FLORENCE PUGH was fit and fight-ready the moment she stepped on the set of Black Widow. One of the earliest set-ups in the film Cate Shortland has been directing in London involved Pugh, as Yelena Belova, and Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanova, going at each other with all manner of lethal weapons: guns . . . knives . . . plates.
Well, the fight did take place in a kitchen.
Pugh went through extensive combat training before filming started. I remember chatting to her after watching her on the set of Fighting With My Family. She’d been in the ring wrestling with Jack Lowden, giving him a pounding.
She joked then that the bruises she received during the choreographed bouts were a good investment. ‘It’s never a waste to know how to fight,’ she told me.
Johansson has appeared in eight other Marvel Comic Universe films as Romanova, aka the Black Widow, including this year’s Avengers: Endgame. But the Black Widow prequel marks the first time that the actress has played the Soviet-trained operative in her own titled film.
Comic book aficionados will know of Romanova’s relationship to Belova; how they were in the same intake of orphaned
schoolgirls chosen to attend the secretive Russian Red Room Academy, to be trained as alpha assassins.
They’re almost siblings at heart; except when they fall out, bodies rather than feelings get hurt.
From what I heard from sources who attended Comic Con in San Diego last weekend, it’s likely the Black Widow film won’t be the last time we’ll see Pugh’s Belova in a Marvel Comic Universe picture.
Black Widow is due to open here next May.
We’ll see more of Ms Pugh before then, though. She plays Amy March in filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
It’s out here on January 24, in time for the next awards season cycle, and also stars Saoirse Ronan (also in Gerwig’s exquisite directorial debut Lady Bird); Emma Watson (she has become an influential advocate for women’s rights and equality while maintaining her screen career), and Eliza Scanlen (outstanding in the HBO-Sky Atlantic miniseries Sharp Objects).
They play March sisters Jo, Meg and Beth, respectively.
Laura Dern, Meryl Streep and Timothee Chalamet are also in Little Women. In the meantime, check out Pugh in director Ari Aster’s acclaimed psychological thriller Midsommar, if you dare.