[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Thunderbolts*, now available to stream at home.] In 2021’s Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson’s former Red Room assassin Natasha Romanoff described Dreykov’s daughter Antonia (Olga Kurylenko) as “collateral damage.” Thought killed in a bombing in Budapest when Natasha defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., Antonia Dreykov survived her father’s attempted assassination as the chip-controlled cyborg that he dispatched as his “Taskmaster Protocol.” A mimic able to mirror the fighting styles of anyone she’s ever seen — whether it’s Black Widow, Hawkeye, Captain America, Winter Soldier, Black Panther, or Spider-Man — Taskmaster was her father’s deadliest agent until Natasha and sister Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) freed her from Dreykov’s brainwashing.
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Kurylenko’s Taskmaster returned in Thunderbolts*, working on assignment for shadowy CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). It turned out that Val sent loose ends — Taskmaster, Yelena, U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell) and Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) — to a vault that would incinerate all her “liabilities,” but Ghost shot and killed Taskmaster before the remaining operatives escaped the blast with Bob (Lewis Pullman).
In a new interview, Kurylenko remarked that Taskmaster was once again collateral damage — this time of the Hollywood writers’ strike that stalled Thunderbolts* back in 2023.
“In the first script, my character was there until the end, but it wasn’t the same script at all,” the Ukrainian-born French actress said in a translated interview with Diverto. “After the strike, the script had nothing to do with it. They changed the concept, they changed the story, the places, where it took place. It wasn’t the same anymore. It’s a pity. It was a cool character.”
Eric Pearson, who wrote Black Widow and co-wrote the Thunderbolts* script reworked by The Bear’s Joanna Calo, confirmed in a previous interview that, in his drafts, Taskmaster survived and became a member of the team eventually renamed the “New Avengers.”
“That is the one biggest change,” he told The Hollywood Reporter about Taskmaster’s sudden death in Val’s vault. “I didn’t get to go to set and finish out this one. I was actually back in Burbank working on Fantastic Four [First Steps] at that point. When I saw the first cut, the biggest change was Taskmaster taking that shot, and I was shocked. In my drafts, Antonia Dreykov/Taskmaster lived out the movie, and she had a bit of a subplot with Ava/Ghost. They’d both been raised in labs, and Ava big-sistered her into how to break free and be her own person.”
Pearson continued, “But I understand why they did it. It was probably just because of my audience reaction of being genuinely surprised. But everything else was exactly where I expected it to be, and [director Jake Schreier] said, ‘We wanted to surprise the audience and raise the stakes and say, Yeah, there’s danger here. No one’s safe. There’s a lot of saying that they’re bad people and seeing that they’re good people, so let’s make sure that we know that they’ve done bad things and have been living their lives doing harsh heartless things.”
Marvel Studios’ Thunderbolts* is now available on digital and PVOD, and the Thunderbolts the New Avengers will return in Avengers: Doomsday in 2026.
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