Florence Pugh wasn’t going to let a movie producer stop her from jumping off of the second-tallest building in the world for a stunt.
Pugh pulled off the daring feat while filming for Marvel’s upcoming film “Thunderbolts*,” but only after succeeding in convincing producers to let her do it after they argued it would be too much of a “crazy insurance ordeal.”
At first, she said, they were going to cut the stunt from the script, which entails Pugh’s character Yelena Belova, aka Black Widow, jumping off of the Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“I was like, ‘what the f—k? Of course we are, we have to do that!’” Pugh told Fandango in an interview published Tuesday. “So I was being a sassy Karen just emailing Kevin (Feige, Marvel Studios president) being like, ‘Kevin, this is going to do wonders for the press tour, we have to do this!’”
Pugh said she “just had to keep pushing” Feige and the producers to let her undertake the challenge, and that eventually they bit, telling her, “Ok, if you want to fall off the second tallest building in the world, we’ll figure that out for you.”
As for the actual stunt itself, Pugh said she went into it pretty fearlessly.
“I don’t mind heights, I quite like them. I enjoy them, but that was a whole different ballgame that was insane,” she said. “The mental control I had to do that day was like, that was its own super power.”
The “Thunderbolts*” stars Pugh, David Harbour, Lewis Pullman, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and Sebastian Stan, among others. It follows a group of antiheroes embarking on a dangerous mission in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that forces them to confront their pasts.
Pugh previously played Belova in 2021’s “Black Widow” film and in the Disney+ miniseries “Hawkeye.” She will also appear in the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday” film in 2026.
“Thunderbolts*” will premiere in theaters on May 2.
Article by Alli Rosenbloom.
