THUNDERBOLTS* Director Jake Schreier Explains [Spoiler]'s Death and Why It Was Added Late in the Process — GeekTyrant

Geek Tyrant

06-05-2025

Director Jake Schreier opened up about the decision to take out the character Antonia Dreykov aka Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko), the tragic, mind-controlled villain from Black Widow early on in the film.
The character was in every Thunderbolts* trailer and poster, seemingly touted as one of the team members. But in her very first scene in the movie, she's unceremoniously shot in the head by Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), who was just fulfilling her latest contract from Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), unaware that it was all a ploy to get her, Taskmaster, U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) to kill each other, thereby erasing all evidence of Val's illegal shadow ops and clearing her of any wrongdoing for her ongoing impeachment trial.
While Yelena figured out the scheme in time to save herself and the others, it was too late for Taskmaster. She unfortunately doesn't live long enough to find redemption or become one of the New Avengers team members, and as it turns out, her death was added to the script kind of last minute, according to the director.
Schreier told EW, "Coming out of the strike, we were about to shoot, and we got shut down, and it gave us some time to step back from the movie. And when we all got back in the room, once the strike was over, and we were thinking about how to improve it, it really felt like the movie seemed just a little bloodless."
While Thunderbolts* was never going to be R-rated, Schreier still wanted to make it feel like any of the characters could die at any moment, especially considering these are all killers and former (maybe still current?) villains.
Schreier added, "For who these characters are, it should live up to those movies that have attention to 'em, where you really don't know who's going to survive it. I know that's tricky in today's era where things get out before movies, but within the context of the film, it felt like we needed to take a swing like that so that you didn't really know who was going to make it, and also so that it was clear that it could have been any one of them."
The speed with which Taskmaster is killed in the movie was also by design to make it as shocking as possible for viewers, which was certainly attained.
"The decision to do it when we did it, we went through a lot of different versions of that, and we thought very carefully about it," the director explains. "And it felt like, while it would've been very nice — and Olga is a wonderful actress — to have her on the team for longer, that death would've kind of reverberated a lot harder and made it harder to find our tonal balance if it had happened later in the film."
He continues, "And it would've occupied such a kind of more emotional space that would've stepped on what we really need to be building. And we have so little narrative real estate to do it, which is the connection between Yelena and Bob [Lewis Pullman], and the movie is really going to hinge on that. And so in order to keep our tone and to build that team together, it actually felt best, even if it feels a little cold-blooded, to have that happen early."
The director also wanted to clarify that, despite their powers and skills, none of these characters are unkillable. "I think it's good to give the audience a reminder of that," he says.
While it seems as if Taskmaster's death has no immediate consequences, Schreier argues that it has a greater impact by driving the rest of the story forward.
"As Yelena says later in the movie, 'She had a tough life. She killed a lot of people, and then she got killed, just like us someday,'" he says. "And I think that her character lives on in the movie in the way they think about that, and what they've done, and what it means to be just sort of blithely going around doing what one is instructed to do, ordered to do, and existing kind of in this darker isolated place."
Marvel doesn't kill very often, but the director says there was no pushback from the comic giant on killing Taskmaster so soon into the movie.
That's an interesting perspective from the director. We saw the movie last Thursday, and my son says he believes Taskmaster is still alive. I don't think so, but anything is possible in Marvel, especially when the multiverse is in play. I was bummed not to see more of her in the story, but I did enjoy what the Thunderbolts* did offer us, and I look forward to seeing them return in Doomsday.