Marvel Actor Confirms They First Auditioned for Taskmaster (& His Version Was Way Different)

O-T Fagbenle was up to the task of playing Black Widow‘s villain. The Handmaid’s Tale actor made his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in the 2021 movie as Rick Mason, the private contractor who owed a debt to Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and was her fixer at a time when she was on the run for violating the Sokovia Accords in Captain America: Civil War. But in a new interview, Fagbenle says he originally auditioned to play Taskmaster, the masked assassin sent after Natasha and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh).

“Basically, I first auditioned for Taskmaster, and it was a really incredible speech, actually,” Fagbenle told TheDirect. “It was an audition I was very proud of. I’ve still got it in the back someplace.” The actor added he “made him with an African accent, and he was this kind of maniacal-like character.”

RELATED: Thunderbolts* Deleted Scene Addressed Yelena’s Hawkeye Hit, But Marvel Cut It

But when screenwriter Eric Pearson reworked the script originally developed by Ned Benson (The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby) and Jac Schaeffer (WandaVision), the Tony Masters version of Taskmaster was rejiggered to be Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) —daughter of the Red Room’s Dreykov (Ray Winstone).

“Somewhere along the journey of writing and things above my pay grade, I basically got [told] that [the role] was down to like, ‘Is it me or is it someone else,’” Fagbenle said. “That kind of thing for that version of Taskmaster. And in the various iterations of the movie, that version of Taskmaster went away, and then they just came to me and was like, ‘Hey, there is this character called Mason, do you want to play Mason?’”

“So I was like, ‘Hell yeah, I’d love to play Mason,’” he continued. “And so the Taskmaster that I was going to be didn’t exist in that iteration of Black Widow.”

Pearson explained changing Taskmaster from Tony Masters to Antonia Dreykov in a 2021 interview with ComicBook, stating that the comic book version of the character — a hired gun with photographic reflexes capable of imitating superhero skills — didn’t quite fit into what had become a story about Russia-sanctioned spies.

“There was a previous draft where [Taskmaster] was a Tony Masters character, but … it was hard because we had certain constants,” Pearson said. “One of the constants was we were right after Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War which meant our great threat, the Red Room… One of the bigger kind of complications was figuring out a villain plot that could succeed and go unnoticed.”

“Which, ultimately, I think kind of works out for a spy thriller film, and also for Dreykov as an ultimate villain,” he continued. “Because he is a bit of a cowardly man who wields power from the shadows, but spends most of his time isolated, like a weird Howard Hughes, just talking about how big he is to himself because he’s too scared to actually kind of like get out there in the world.”

It also allowed Pearson to tie Natasha’s traumatic past — the red in her ledger — back to the film’s more physical threat, Taskmaster.

“Tony Masters didn’t seem to really fit into that. And meanwhile, we had this mystery of, ‘What happened to Dreykov’s daughter?’” Pearson explained. “It seemed like because Natasha Romanoff’s story is always going to be more grounded, but you still want some Marvel fun, fantastic in it. The idea of an accident going wrong and we’ve already got this facility now in the Red Room … and the idea of mind control and rebuilding and controlling the human brain, the idea of an accident going wrong with a loved one, and using the technology to reconstruct that person’s mind [and] finding something new, finding the photographic reflexes in rebuilding that mind, that felt like a good Marvel comic book addition to an otherwise more grounded spy thriller thing.”

Kurylenko’s Taskmaster returns in Thunderbolts*, also written by Pearson, who originally had her play a larger role in the ensemble that includes Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes, Wyatt Russell’s John Walker, David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr. Black Widow is available to stream on Disney+, and Thunderbolts* is now playing only in theaters.