Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) still gives Chris Smith (John Cena) butterflies. In the first season of Peacemaker, Holland’s A.R.G.U.S. agent from The Suicide Squad is assigned to Project Butterfly, Amanda Waller’s (Viola Davis) black ops task force consisting of contract killer Peacemaker, tech and tactics expert John Economos (Steve Agee), new recruit Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), and mercenary and team leader Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji). As Smith’s handler in the field, Harcourt works with the helmeted anti-hero to identify and eliminate “Butterflies,” parasitic aliens that inhabit human hosts and inherit their memories.
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In “Better Goff Dead,” Harcourt and Peacemaker bond during a mission to assassinate Senator Goff (Antonio Cupo), revealed to be inhabited by Butterfly queen Eek Stack Ik Ik.
After Peacemaker kills the queen’s host body and keeps her in a jar with the name “Goff,” she eventually escapes and possesses Detective Sophie Song (Annie Chang) in order to carry out the Butterfly invasion of Earth. But Team Peacemaker destroys the alien “cow” that sustains the Butterflies, and Peacemaker pours the last of its amber fluid into a jar for his friend Goff.
By season’s end, “Murn” is revealed to be the benevolent Butterfly Ik Nobe Llok, and is the only member of Team Peacemaker not to survive. But in an early version of the show, Harcourt would have been inhabited by Goff as another casualty of the Butterflies.
“Harcourt got taken over by Goff,” Gunn revealed on Monday’s episode of Peacemaker: The Official Podcast. “There was more of a pronounced line of Goff being in love with Peacemaker, and Peacemaker is in love with Harcourt, and he keeps her alive and stays with Harcourt even though she’s been taken over by Goff.”
Gunn clarified, “When I say I changed it, these were all just outlines where I was trying to figure stuff out. It was a possible [direction] — it wasn’t a fully written script. But in that version, season 2 would have been Goff as Harcourt.”
“I just can’t imagine a version that’s not what season 2 is now, so I’m grateful it is what it is,” added Holland, who has portrayed the character in 2021’s The Suicide Squad and the no-longer-canon Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods.
“Right now I’m really enjoying playing a human being in a world of superheroes,” Holland recently told ComicBook about her character, a seasoned agent for the CIA and the DEO (Department of Extranormal Operations) before joining A.R.G.U.S. “I’m playing a person who is, in some ways, superhuman in her strength for a small, petite person. But I have to look like, and feel like, a person who can actually be capable of the type of destruction that she’s capable of. And that’s a really interesting person to play.”
“I have to work really hard on my body and my capabilities with fighting and [skills], because you need to believe that she’s capable of doing these things,” she continued. “And that’s a fun challenge.”
John Cena, Danielle Brooks, Jennifer Holland, Freddie Stroma, Steve Agee, and Robert Patrick return for season two, joined by new cast members Frank Grillo, David Denman, Sol Rodríguez, and Tim Meadows. Peacemaker season 2 premieres August 21 on HBO Max.
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