Captain America: The Winter Soldier's Scarlett Johansson: Marvel Characters to be Darker, More Complex

In a new interview with MovieFone, Scarlett Johansson said that she thinks that audiences are ready for The Avengers to go darker and more complex. The Captain America: The Winter Soldier star thinks that, in general, it's time for the pasts of Marvel's premiere super team to come back to haunt them -- but especially her character, Black Widow, whose shadowy past you get to see glimpses of in Cap 2. "I think all of these characters have dark pasts," Johansson said. "A lot of us are superheroes that didn't choose to be. My character is a mercenary to begin with and was sort of put into the Widow program. She's had a dark past, and she's just beginning to discover how her past affects her when we see her in Cap 2. I think she's had to dehumanize in a way, obviously, as anyone in that position does just to be able to accomplish the things that she's had to. But now she's like, 'Wow, I actually have nightmares about this stuff.' She's starting to realize, Wow, I'm a product of what I've done in some way. And I think, in Avengers 2, it's about time that our past comes back to haunt us in some way—all of us, I think, in one way or another."

The past coming back to haunt them is a concept that Johansson has brought up in a few interviews -- interesting, given the fact in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, some of the work that Tony Stark and Bruce Banner had done with S.H.I.E.L.D. came into play in surprising ways. Of course, it could be problematic for Marvel to head in that direction. With lighthearted films (mostly) and lots of humor, they've differentiated themselves from the dark and increasingly R-rating-adjacent summer blockbuster crop, including DC's superhero movies, by clinging to an Indiana Jones-style pulp-adventure aesthetic that a "dark and complex" approach might conflict with. "I think the audience is ready for that," Johansson said. "These characters' relationships become even muckier. Nothing's getting cleaned up and tied up in a big, red shiny bow in Avengers 2. It's complex, and the universe is expanding even more. More characters are coming in, but that only feels like it enriches the story. Joss has made room in a very, very impressive way for those new characters to come in, to be introduced. This is not the kind of rehashing of what you've already seen, but just in a different setting. It's the progression of these characters. And everything's in real time, you know, it's been 3 or 4 years. The world as we know it is the world as we know it. It's the next step—the next level."