Florence Pugh took a literal leap of faith while filming Thunderbolts*.
When it came time to shoot the MCU’s latest installment, the Academy Award nominee practically had to beg the president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, to allow her to perform a stunt that would see her jump off the second-tallest building in the world.
“It was in the script, and then slowly as we got closer and closer to shooting, they were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t think it’s gonna happen, it’s just gonna be a crazy insurance ordeal, and obviously we’re not going to throw FP off the second-tallest building in the world,’” Pugh said during a Monday interview with Fandango.
But the We Live in Time star refused to back down. She was steadfast in her desire to perform the stunt which called for her launch herself off the 2,227-foot Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She reached out to Feige personally, arguing that having her execute the stunt would be the kind of promotion you couldn’t buy.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck, of course we are. We have to do that!’” she said. “So I was being a sassy Karen just emailing Kevin and being like, ‘Kevin, this is going to do wonders for the press tour, we have to do this!’”
Marvel ultimately gave in to her persistence: ‘Then they were like, ‘Okay, you wanna fall off the second-tallest building in the world? We’ll figure that out for you.’”
Pugh admitted that she doesn’t “mind heights” and actually “enjoy[s] them,” but carrying out the Thunderbolts* stunt “was a whole different ball game.” After executing the jump, Pugh “fell asleep for three hours,” because of how taxing the moment was for her brain.
“The mental control I had to do that day was like — that was its own superpower,” she added.
Pugh joins Marvel’s Thunderbolts* — which “assembles an unconventional team of antiheroes” — as Yelena Belova, a character she originated first in the Jeremy Renner-led series Hawkeye and played once more in Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow film. Sebastian Stan (Bucky Barnes), David Harbour (Red Guardian), Hannah John-Kamen (Ghost), Olga Kurylenko (Taskmaster), Wyatt Russell (John Walker) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Valentina Allegra de Fontaine) round out the cast.
Thunderbolts* arrives in theaters on May 2.
