Florence Pugh has revealed that she had to consistently email Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige to allow her to perform a daring stunt in the forthcoming film Thunderbolts.
The 29-year-old actor returns as her MCU character Yelena Belova for the new blockbuster, reprising the role she previously played in 2021’s Black Widowand the Hawkeye streaming series.
In the film, Pugh takes a leaf out of Tom Cruise’s book and executes a highly dangerous and impressive stunt, which involved her base-jumping off the second tallest building on Earth.Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia stands at a staggering 2,722 feet tall. Although the prospect of jumping off of such a structure would be traumatising to many people, Pugh, who says she actually enjoys heights, embraced the challenge.
Speaking to Fandango, the Midsommar star said that the problem wasn’t so much with the stunt itself but with Marvel.“I got on all the emails. It was in the script, and then slowly as we got closer and closer to shooting, they said they don’t think it’s going to happen because it’s a crazy insurance ordeal and obviously we’re not going to throw [me] off the second tallest building in the world,” Pugh explained.“I was like what the f***? Of course, we are! We have to do that.”
Pugh added: “I was being a sassy Karen emailing Kevin [Feige] and saying it’s going to do wonders for the press tour.
“We have to do this! We’re going to have three women break three different Guinness World Records and we’ll do this and this. I had to keep on pushing and then they’re like, ‘Okay, if you want to fall off the second tallest building, we’ll figure it out for you.’ I don’t mind heights. I quite like them and enjoy them, but that was a whole different ballgame and insane. The mental control I had to do that day was its own superpower.”
Continuing, Pugh said that she fell asleep for three hours after the stunt due to the adrenaline comedown from the jump.Thunderbolts, out in cinemas on 2 May, will focus on an ensemble of antiheroes from the MCU and also stars Sebastian Stan, Hannah John-Kamen, Wyatt Russell, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Harbour and Olga Kurylenko.Pugh was recently confirmed to be returning for Avengers: Doomsday in 2026, where she’ll be part of a huge cast of stars including Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Mackie, Tom Hiddleston, Paul Rudd, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Channing Tatum.