Black Widow Star Rachel Weisz Reveals New Details About Her Deadly Marvel Character

Marvel Cinematic Universe newcomer Rachel Weisz reveals new details behind her character, super-spy Melina Vostokoff, in Marvel Studios’ Black Widow. Part of Marvel’s Phase 4 and set in-between the events of Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, the “mid-quel” sees Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) “confront the darker parts of her ledger when a conspiracy with ties to her past arises.” Natasha reunites with her found family — the assassin Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the former Red Guardian Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour), and Melina, a five-time trainee of Russia’s killer-making Red Room program — when she’s pursued by the mysterious killer called Taskmaster.

“She is a Black Widow. She’s been trained as a Black Widow spy, she’s a highly-skilled spy and scientist,” Weisz said when describing her top-secret character on Jimmy Kimmel Live! “She runs kind of, well, a pig farm. That’s where the family have met me [in the clip], at my scientific lab where I also keep pigs which I experiment on.”

Responding to Kimmel’s quip calling Melina a “pig-farming spy-entist,” Weisz added her Black Widow is “highly-skilled, highly-trained in combat, [and] fluent in 25 languages.”

In the Marvel comics, Melina is a Russian agent and a masked master spy and assassin. As the armored Iron Maiden, Melina repeatedly tries to kill her hated arch-enemy: the Black Widow.

The film from first-time Marvel director Cate Shortland is “definitely about finding out where you belong, and where you’ve come from, and what your origin story was, and who you really are, and what matters to you — your ideology, I guess,” Weisz previously told Total Film magazine.

In Marvel Studios’ action-packed spy thriller “Black Widow,” Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow confronts the darker parts of her ledger when a dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past arises. Pursued by a force that will stop at nothing to bring her down, Natasha must deal with her history as a spy and the broken relationships left in her wake long before she became an Avenger.

Starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Ray Winstone, William Hurt, and Rachel Weisz, Marvel’s Black Widow releases in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access on July 9.

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