When you think of actors who perform their own stunts, Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan instantly come to mind. After Marvel’s Thunderbolts* it’s time to add Black Widow actress Florence Pugh to the list. That’s because the Academy Award-winning Pugh, who plays Yelena Bolova, the latest character to inherit the Black Widow mantle after succeeding Scarlet Johansson’s Natasha Romanov in the 2021 Black Widow film, really jumped off the Merdeka 118, a 2,227-foot building (the second tallest in the world) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during filming. And it was all her idea.
“I was like, ‘What the f—, of course we are. We have to do that!’” she said when MCU head Kevin Feige tried convincing her otherwise. “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!’”
Initially, Marvel Studios and Feige were hesitant to let Pugh actually jump off the Merdeka 118, citing “crazy insurance ordeals” as their reasoning.
“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 explained in a press interview with Fandango.
Much like her Black Widow character however, Pugh was perseverant. And her perseverance paid off as eventually Marvel Studio and Feige relented.
‘Then they were like, ‘Okay, you wanna fall off the second-tallest building in the world? We’ll figure that out for you.’”
Luckily, Pugh “doesn’t mind heights and actually “enjoys them,” but being on top of the Merdeka 118 was admittedly “a whole different ballgame that was insane.”
Pugh added, “The mental control I had to do that day was like, that was its own super power” and that after executing the jump she “fell asleep for three hours” because of how taxing the psyching up process was on her mental state.
Thunderbolts*, which sees Pugh’s Black Widow join forces with Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker/USAgent, Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost and Olga Kurylenko’s Taskmaster to form an unconventional team of antiheroes. The movie hits theaters on May 2nd.
What do you think of the fact that it was Florence Pugh’s idea to jump off the 2nd tallest building in the world in Thunderbolts*? Are you looking forward to seeing how the scene looks on the big screen? Let us know in the comments.
