Of any Marvel character, Yelena Belova has had it particularly rough. She was raised in a sleeper cell family, and forced into being a young assassin. Then she was blipped out of existence for five years. And when she rematerialised, she found that her sister – Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow – was dead, having sacrificed herself during the Avengers’ efforts to bring everybody back. Bummer. While she has new back-up in Thunderbolts*, Florence Pugh’s sharp-shooter finds herself surrounded by undesirables and anti-heroes – like Wyatt Russell’s disgraced former Cap, John Walker, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost. (Above you’ll see them all alongside Lewis Pullman’s mysterious ‘Bob’.)
As Pugh tells Empire, the Yelena we meet in Thunderbolts* is one who carries the weight of everything she’s been through. “She’s a completely different person to the person that you’d assume she would be,” she says. “She’s coming out of a few years of quite traumatic events. Where does that leave a person?” In a team as messed-up as the Thunderbolts, apparently.
Russell, however, is excited about the evolution of John Walker, aka U.S. Agent. Introduced in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier as a particularly punchable riff on the Steve Rogers archetype, before going spectacularly off the rails and losing the Captain America mantle, he’s rougher and readier in his Thunderbolts* get-up. “We look fucking cool,” Russell puts it. “And last time, I’m gonna be honest, I don’t think I looked very cool.” The biggest upgrade? The headgear. “[This time] they made my helmet not look like the end of a penis,” says Russell. Fitting, at least, for a character who turned out to be a bit of a dick.
Read Empire’s full Thunderbolts* article – running through every member of the disreputable super-team – in the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning issue, on sale Thursday 13 February. Order a copy online here. Thunderbolts* comes to UK cinemas from 2 May.