The Hollywood Reporter

Russell says his background in sports fueled his desire for the movie to be so good that it proves doubters wrong: “I want to make you eat your words.”

There’s a scene in Jake Schreier’s Thunderbolts* where Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes ruins an illusion that Wyatt Russell’s John Walker has been trying to uphold. Walker proceeds to give such a vulnerable look to Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova that you might find yourself reevaluating how you feel about the disgraced former Captain America from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ series. It’s one of the many unexpected moments in, arguably, Marvel Studios’ most unexpected superhero tale to date.

Stan and Russell recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss some of the other unanticipated components of the film, starting with Congressman Barnes, something that was first set up in Captain America: Brave New World. Bucky visited the new Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), at a moment when he needed his friend most, and the then-former Winter Soldier had to cut their reunion short due to a “stupid” campaign fundraiser.

Well, Thunderbolts* picks back up with Bucky now elected and known as Congressman Barnes, and Stan likens his role to a retired athlete who is brought back by their most tenured team to serve as an ambassador. They don’t have a major impact on the team’s day-to-day, but it makes fans feel good to see their past icons hanging around still. However, as Thunderbolts’ marketing campaign reveals in the form of Stan’s homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Bucky can only put the (non-brainwashed) Winter Soldier on ice for so long.

“He’s also had his own suspicions about [Julia Louis-Dreyfus’] Valentina, so I think [congress] is his way of trying to, in the legal and moral way, keep track of her. And then he realizes, ‘I can just do this in my way, the way that I’ve always done it [as The Winter Soldier],’” Stans tells THR in support of Thunderbolts’ May 2 theatrical release.

In December 2023, Russell teased to THR that Thunderbolts* would not be your tried-and-true Marvel superhero film, and it’s now come to light that the film is genuinely about mental health. Louis-Dreyfus’ CIA director, Valentine Allegra de Fontaine, has positioned a number of MCU loners and rejects — such as Yelena, Walker, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and newcomer “Bob” (Lewis Pullman) — to kill each other for her own nefarious reasons. But they instead decide to team up in response to the obvious setup.

Along the way, each antihero is forced to confront the most unpleasant corners of their mind, and Russell, as a former accomplished hockey player, was eager to disprove anyone who wrote Thunderbolts* off as just another superhero team-up.

“We came to this as a group of people who were like, ‘Let’s make this our own thing, let’s make it great and let’s make people put their foot in their mouths,’” Russell says. “I have a little bit of an athletic background, so I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to make you eat your words if you’re like, “This movie’s going to blow, I don’t want to go see it.”’”

Below, during a recent conversation with THR, Stan and Russell also discuss the highly collaborative nature of the Thunderbolts set.
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