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Timothée Chalamet has revealed that Leonardo DiCaprio warned him not to make superhero movies but his Dune co-star Florence Pugh has already starred in Black Widow as Scarlett Johansson’s sister.
Veteran legends like Robert Redford, Glenn Close and Michelle Pfeiffer have all taken prominent Marvel roles, and few stars have ever made any public complaints.
Christopher Ecclestone famously broke ranks when he described working on Thor: Dark World as so horrendous it was like “putting a gun in my mouth… I really paid for being a whore.”
And now a British star has revealed his own unhappiness with the way the Marvel machine works.
Ray Winstone is best known for his catalogue of gritty East End, primarily gangster, roles in films like Nil By Mouth and Sexy Beast. He brought his typical swagger and menace and (just about, kind of) covered up his trademark accent to play Russian baddie Dreykov in Black Widow.
Dreykov was the shadowy figure behind the brutal Russian version of the Captain America programme, known as the Red Room.
In the Black Widow: The Official Movie Special Book, the actor enthusiastically described the role: “He’s a guy who came out of old Russia after the breakdown of communism. He really wanted to change something and wanted to protect his nation. I think he was a man who started off with great intentions, but like most great men who are put into a situation, the greed and the power takes over.”
Unforunately, he later confessed that he was unable to bring what he wanted to the part and was left disillusioned.
Black Widow writer Eric Pearson described Dreykov as “a scumbag-y villain who is basically a coward and hiding in the dark, puppeteering things. And because they’re such a coward, not caring about how much they’re ruining other people’s lives.”
Sounds a little different from Winstone’s layered take on the character but the actor said he went in and gave his performance the way he saw it – and then Marvel bosses stepped in.
Winstone, 67, told Radio Times this week: “It was fine until you have to do the reshoots. Then you find out that a few producers have come down, and your performance is too much, it’s too strong… That’s the way Marvel works. It can be soul-destroying because you feel like you’re doing great work.
“I actually said, ‘You ought to recast it because that was it for me.’ And you end up doing it again because you’re contracted to do it. Otherwise, you end up in court. It’s like being kicked in the b*lls.”