Hawkeye Director Fought Hard to Include This Surprising Avengers Hero

In Marvel’s Hawkeye, the non-super powered Avenger finally gets his time in the spotlight, but the all-new series from the House of Ideas is also introducing a ton of new character into the MCU. Not only will Echo, Swordsman, and Kate Bishop make their debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the series, you never know who else might pop up. Previous Marvel Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier brought back Don Cheadle’s War Machine for a brief appearance, could Hawkeye do the same? Well, maybe, but according to one of the directors on the show his attempts to get another Avenger were rebuffed.

Director Rhys Thomas, who helmed three of the six episodes in the show and whose previous credits include Documentary Now! and John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch, revealed to The Playlist that he really wanted Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man in the show. “I don’t want to reveal anything because we do kinda get to introduce [some characters],” Thomas told the outlet. “Here’s one-Ant-man. Paul [Rudd] and Jeremy’s dynamic together I enjoy. I enjoyed their press tour dynamic when they were on the ‘Avengers’ run. So [Ant-Man] was a character that felt like a fun way to play at the absurdity of Clint’s situation…but I did get to have a little nod to that.”

Thomas further teased the process of working in the Marvel machine and pitching ideas that didn’t get approved because of plans happening elsewhere in the MCU.

“I’d be firing off these notes and ideas. Sometimes, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘I’ve solved it!’ And you get all excited about pitching it, and then that’s when someone like Kevin [Feige], the overarching brain of it all, will go, ‘Yeah, that’s really good and all but yeah, we’re already doing that in this movie.’….They don’t overwhelm you. They don’t go, ‘Okay, here’s a big book and plan, so make sure you don’t touch the sides, don’t do that.’ They really just wait for you to stumble into them, and they kinda push you back in another direction.”

In addition to Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld, Hawkeye stars Vera Farmiga as Eleanor Bishop, Tony Dalton as Jack Duquesne, Alaqua Cox as Echo, Zahn McClarnon as William Lopez, and Florence Pugh reprising her Black Widow role of Yelena Belova. 

The first two episodes of Hawkeye are now sreaming on Disney+.