Summary
- Actor Ray Winstone speaks out about his experience working for Marvel in the Black Widow movie
- Winstone found the reshoots and production process to be “soul-destroying” and felt like quitting
- The movie’s messaging about women’s empowerment and addressing #MeToo issues may have contributed to its failure at the box office
Fans can relate to this, as the actor who played the villain of the Black Widow movie starring Scarlett Johansson speaks out about working for Marvel and says it’s “soul destroying” and “like being kicked in the balls.”
Ray Winstone played the villain, General Dreykov, the bad guy akin to Harvey Weinstein, who led the Red Room, the top secret Soviet training program that turned young girls into elite assassins.
“It can be soul-destroying”
While speaking with the Radio Times about his latest movie, Damsel on Netflix which stars Millie Bobby Brown (where she plays a damsel that doesn’t need saving), he talked about how much of a pain in the you-know-where it was doing the reshoots for Marvel.
“It was fine until you have to do the reshoots,” he said. “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.”
Was ready to give up
Ray Winstone continues admitting that he felt like quitting.
“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 balls,” he said.
Ray Winstone revealing that originally he was playing an even “badder” bad guy is pretty interesting as it sounds like they had him tone things down, possibly for the PG-13 MCU audience.
All about sending The Message
Prior to the release of Black Widow, Scarlett Johansson compared the film to the #MeToo movement.
“I think this film in particular is very much reflective of what’s going on in regards to the Time’s Up movement and the #MeToo movement,” she told Empire Magazine. “It would be such a miss if we didn’t address that stuff, if this film didn’t take that head-on. I think, particularly for Cate, it was so important for her to make a movie about women who are helping other women, who lift other women up out of a very difficulty situation. Someone asked me if Natasha was a feminist. Of course she is, it’s obvious. It’s kinda an asinine question.”
As we all know, Black Widow bombed and ushered in a string of female-led failures in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the latest being The Marvels starring Brie Larson and Iman Vellani that lost Disney $200 million.
Florence Pugh recently made it sounds as if Thunderbolts is more of a sequel to Black Widow, and rumors offer she is the lead while The Winter Soldier is at the bottom.
