Florence Pugh has revealed she had to fight Marvel to allow her to perform a terrifying jump for the new Marvel Cinematic Universe adventure Thunderbolts*.
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Pugh returns to the role of Yelena Belova, her character from 2021’s Black Widow and TV show Hawkeye. She joins an unexpected team of reluctant heroes to save the world, with each member addressing their own dark pasts.
Part of the filming involved base jumping from Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, the second tallest building on Earth at 2,722 feet. While the actor was excited to film the stunt, studio Marvel were not so keen, leading to her sending some terse emails to Marvel chief Kevin Feige.
“I got on all the emails. It was in the script, and then slowly as we got closer and closer to shooting, they said they don’t think it’s going to happen because it’s a crazy insurance ordeal and obviously we’re not going to throw [me] off the second tallest building in the world,” she told Fandango. “I was like what the f***? Of course, we are! We have to do that”.
Florence Pugh explains how she convinced Marvel and Kevin Feige to let her jump off the second tallest building in the world in #Thunderbolts*. Only in theaters May 2 – Get tickets on Fandango. https://t.co/Tckyknk48x pic.twitter.com/1rczepKKYG
— Fandango (@Fandango) April 14, 2025
She then recalled her efforts to get the scene done, joking: “I was being a sassy Karen emailing Kevin (Feige) and saying ‘it’s going to do wonders for the press tour. We have to do this! We’re going to have three women break three different Guinness World Records and we’ll do this and this’”.
She continued: “I had to keep on pushing and then they’re like, ‘Okay, if you want to fall off the second tallest building, we’ll figure it out for you.’ I don’t mind heights. I quite like them and enjoy them, but that was a whole different ballgame and insane. The mental control I had to do that day was its own superpower”.
While she enjoyed doing the feat, she confessed that the adrenaline dump afterwards led to a long nap. “I feel asleep for three hours after I did the stunt because my brain just went like (into shut down)” she recalled.
Thunderbolts* is in cinemas from May 2. Recently, Florence Pugh revealed why she would never make a film like horror hit Midsommar again.