We first met Taskmaster in Black Widow, with a third-act reveal that he was really a she: Antonia Dreykov, the daughter of the Red Room's twisted leader. She found redemption during the final act and, somewhere between then and Thunderbolts*, became a mercenary for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine.
Olga Kurylenko only shows her face once in the movie and gets a single line of dialogue before she's gunned down by Ghost. She and U.S. Agent pick her bones for the weaponry they like the look of, and the assassin is left to burn.
Talking to Polygon, Thunderbolts* writer Eric Pearson confirmed that Taskmaster had a much different role in the script he wrote. It wasn't until he sat down to watch the first cut of the movie that he realised her entire story arc was gone (remember, Joanna Calo also took a pass on the movie).
In his draft, Antonia gets "a pretty big subplot" and was set to bond with the Ant-Man and The Wasp villain who shoots her in the head in the theatrical cut. Pearson felt they had a lot in common, "as people who’d grown up in labs and been controlled that way."
"And Ava, having won her autonomy earlier in the chronology than Taskmaster, was kind of big-sistering her a little bit, in a way of 'how to break free and be your own person,'" he added.
"I mean, everyone in there has suffered a ton of tragedy," Pearson said of what she originally brought to the movie. "But she was kind of the ultimate tragedy. In the old tragedy rankings, she was at the top, and the other, bigger personalities — no one could get out of line, because no one could say 'I had it worse than you.'"
"On the comedy side, she was struggling with her own memory-loss stuff, and there was a gag where she just kept restarting the fight [with John Walker] and forgetting that they had made up and become friends."
"They would be discussing the plan of how to get out [of the vault], and she’d just go after him again, and they’d all have to pig-pile on each other, and pull her off, and be like, 'No, we know each other! We’ve had this conversation before!'" he continued, suggesting it might have been cut due to the similarity to Bob's own amnesia.
As for why all this was cut, Pearson doesn't know, but it doesn't sound like any of this was shot. We can guess, of course, and it may have something to do with fans being so vocal about not wanting to see Taskmaster return to the MCU after Black Widow.
There's only so much room in an ensemble, and Antonia's arc may well have been considered the most superfluous by filmmaker Jake Schreier.
Thunderbolts* is now playing in theaters.