Wyatt Russell, who plays John Walker, the US Agent, in Thunderbolts*, is determined that people who think the movie will be bad are wrong. His character first debuted in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as the government’s new Captain America, but took a turn towards a darker side after beating someone to death with the shield in front of many witnesses and eventually became something more resembling an anti hero.
Now, he has some strong words for anyone who thinks Thunderbolts* looks bad.
“We came to this as a group of people who were like, ‘Let’s make this our own thing, let’s make it great and let’s make people put their foot in their mouths,’” Russell told The Hollywood Reporter. “I have a little bit of an athletic background, so I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to make you eat your words if you’re like, “This movie’s going to blow, I don’t want to go see it.”’”
Clearly, Russell is a competitive person and his competitive side is showing when it comes to Thunderbolts*. He went on to describe the different, more mature themes in the film. It tackles loneliness and depression particularly related to Russell’s character. When asked if he was shocked that this kind of story could be told in the MCU, he had the following to say.
“Yeah, a little bit. How do you go from making the kind of [Marvel] movies that you’ve seen the past 15 years — and knowing how most of those movies have performed — to then doing anything outside the realm of what you’ve known Marvel to be? It’s a departure in any way, shape, or form — and a risk. This type of storytelling isn’t often told in any superhero form. It’s much more like a team of people who are very good at what they do, and they’re fighting a bad guy who has some existential threat about him. The world’s going to blow up or people are going to disappear, whatever it is, and they need to stop him. But this is a bunch of people who have main character syndrome, and they have to come together as one team. They’re thrust into an environment where they have to be a team, but they don’t want to be, and that just makes for interesting people.”
He further elaborated on how both the characters in the movie and the actors themselves are not “primed” by Marvel. The characters are all generally considered side characters that only exist to support a main character in other movies or TV shows. The actors themselves didn’t start off in Marvel movies. They made their way to Marvel through other successes.
“But it was a challenge because this is not a primed movie. There are no characters in this film, really, that have their own stuff in the Marvel universe that much. It’s not Captain America, it’s not Thor, it’s not Iron Man, it’s not the Avengers. [Thunderbolts*] is more of these misfit types. And that challenge that Kevin Feige gave Jake [Schreier] and this particular group of actors, it was like, “Hell yeah.””
“I don’t want to speak for everybody, but most of us didn’t make it by doing this. Everybody didn’t come to this as a young person and make it this way. I did weird TV shows for a million years, and David [Harbour] has been acting on Broadway [since 2000]. Sebastian had a whole career before he joined Marvel, and while he’s been a part of it for so long, he’s also done so many incredible things outside of Marvel. It has not defined him. Florence, same thing.”
It’s an interesting comparison and not one that comes to mind right away when thinking of the characters in Thunderbolts* and the actors that portray them.
Have Wyatt Russell’s words convinced you to go see Thunderbolts*? Let us know in the comments!