Late last month
Dear White People actress Tessa Thompson who plays the heroine Valkyrie in the recently released
Thor: Ragnarok took to Twitter in response to two "fans" discussing their displeasure with both her casting and the characters lack of "sex-appeal" in the film in it she revealed what comic book readers already knew that Valkyrie is bisexual.
Upon the film's release however many were surprised (or not as the case may be) to see that aspect not reflected in the final film. In a recent profile with
Rolling Stone magazine however it was revealed that the Taika Waititi directed threequel did indeed originally have a scene that would have explicitly acknowledged this.
Thompson even summoned the courage to pitch Waititi on making Valkyrie bisexual, based on her comic book relationship with anthropologist Annabelle Riggs. “There’s this great illustration of them in a kiss,” swoons Thompson, and while Valkyrie has yet to meet Annabelle in her Hollywood timeline – and who knows if she’ll get to – she convinced Waititi to shoot a glimpse of a woman walking out of Valkyrie’s bedroom. He kept it in the film as long as he could; eventually the bit had to be cut because it distracted from the scene’s vital exposition.
Though this moment was cut - another in a long line of tentpole films that have trouble directly acknowledging sexualities other than straight - Tessa Thompson has also said that she tried to nevertheless remain faithful to her that aspect of her character regardless. As she continues:
“There were things that we talked about that we allowed to exist in the characterization, but maybe not be explicit in the film,” admits Thompson. Pay attention to her agony in a flashback where Blanchett’s Goddess of Death murders the rest of Valkyrie’s warrior clan. “There’s a great shot of me falling back from one of my sisters who’s just been slain,” says Thompson. “In my mind, that was my lover.”
Speaking to ThePlaylist.net the film's director (and Korg performer) Taika Waititi spoke briefly about the cut moment.
“We had talked about it. There was one moment that didn’t make it into the film where she was hanging out with a girl,” Waititi recalls. “If you were to read into that you can see that in her flashback. There is a girl there and maybe perhaps there’s something there that was her girlfriend. Who knows. We tried to make sure it wasn’t super specific or that we were trying to say ‘She’s a lesbian! She’s bi! We really gotta get everyone on board with this!’ It’s more like, ‘Look if you want to read anything into that you can make sense of it in parts of the film.’ I know that she had that and she was using that in her process and stuff. And I’m totally supportive of that. Why not?”
So there you have it, this certainly clears up Tessa's comments in regards to the character's sexuality not explicitly being stated in the film but still influenced and informed in her performance.
It is a shame that it was cut as that small moment could have meant a lot to some people and been a first step for Disney and Marvel on the way to allowing us to see more of ourselves in superheroes and to allow LGBTQ characters to exist in large tentpole films for the whole family as opposed to depressing dramas where their lives are terrible because of their sexuality.
If there was any franchise that has the cache and market security to do it, it would have been the MCU but alas. As all of us who would like to see something like this are all to used to saying: maybe next time.
THOR: RAGNAROK IS IN THEATRES NOW
Director: Taika Waititi
Chris Hemsworth as Thor Odinson
Tom Hiddleston as Loki Laufeyson
Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk
Cate Blanchett as Hela
Idris Elba as Heimdall
Sir Anthony Hopkins as Odin Borson
Jeff Goldblum as Grandmaster
Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie
Karl Urban as Skurge/The Executioner