Laura Donnelly is open to exploring more about her Werewolf by Night character Elsa Bloodstone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The spooky Halloween-inspired Special Presentation is available now on Disney+, introducing new supernatural characters to the MCU. Fans meet the titular Werewolf by Night, Jack Russell (Gael Garcia Bernal), and Man-Thing and Donnelly’s Elsa Bloodstone. As with most Marvel projects, there is the potential for these characters to show up down the line in either streaming shows or feature films. Since Werewolf by Night touches on elements of Elsa’s family history, it seems likely that fans will see more of monster hunter down the road.
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Brandon Davis of ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero podcast spoke to Laura Donnelly about Werewolf by Night. Donnelly is asked if she did any research into Elsa Bloodstone’s family tree when she landed the role, and if she’s looking forward to exploring those details in the future.
“I would love to be able to delve more into her background going forward and I did do all of that, the reading and the research,” Donnelly told ComicBook.com “I read Nextwave and I read her one-shot novel and things like that to get an idea of it and then I discussed with Michael [Giacchino], our director, how much of that we were keeping as truth for her character and how much we hadn’t decided on yet and things like that. So yeah, there’s a lot of her background I think that stays true, but not all of it, and we find Elsa in a moment, where she has been away from her family and she has been kind of disengaged from that whole world, that her father brought her up in and now she’s coming back into it for the first time. So for me, that was so much more of an interesting way to be able to see that character for the first time as she’s coming back into a situation, particularly one that makes her very uncomfortable and in which she doesn’t know, in the context, she doesn’t really know who she is or where she belongs anymore. So that for me made it really interesting.”
Why Werewolf By Night Is Not a Movie or TV Series
Legendary composer Michael Giacchino directed Werewolf by Night and it’s the first Marvel project that takes place in black-and-white. Another unique distinction of the project is it’s neither a TV show nor movie, instead classified as a “Special Presentation.” Co-executive producer Brian Gay explained why Werewolf by Night is a stand-alone special rather than a feature film or episodic series.
“It’s funny that sometimes things just come together. And it was just one of those. We’d always wondered: where could we introduce Werewolf by Night?” Gay exclusively told ComicBook of Jack Russell (played by Gael García Bernal), cursed to transform into a feral beast known as the Werewolf. “We love the character. What feels right? And of course, movie, TV show, series, different length of series, but Disney+ lets us be very flexible with what we do.”
Unlike recent Marvel Studios series like Moon Knight and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Marvel’s Werewolf by Night is contained to a 53-minute one-off (which is considered feature-length, per Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rules).
“One of the things that had always come up is we love a good old network special, something like Charlie Brown’s Christmas or Frosty the Snowman, things like that that were specials and they show once, or maybe they show every year,” Gay explained. “And we said, ‘Well, could we do one of those?’ And it turns out the answer was yes. And that’s where Werewolf by Night came from.”
Werewolf by Night is available to stream now on Disney+.
