What likely drove Marvel Studios to cast Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the self-serving government official, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, in the first place was the similar self-serving demeanor she’s brought to all her other roles. But according to her, she took the job with hopes of expanding beyond that kind of type-casting.
In a new interview with SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, Louis-Dreyfus confessed that she would like to take on more action-oriented roles, and that she pushed Kevin Feige to let de Fontaine do just that in the upcoming Thunderbolts Asterisk movie.
“I said to the guys, when I met with them, I said, you know, I really want to get into it,” Louis-Dreyfus said. “You know, I don’t want to just walk down a hallway and talk. I wanted to, you know, play. I want to get in the sandbox and play and I did to a certain extent in this film….You know, what appealed to me about this before signing onto any of it was that it’s not like what I’ve done before.”
Whether this means we’ll be seeing Elaine Benes karate-kicking thugs or jumping off tall buildings next month is anybody’s guess, but perhaps not the latter, if her story about co-star Florence Pugh is true.
Julia Cunningham: You know, your character, we’ve seen her more, not necessarily behind the desk, that’s not fair, but we have seen her more in meetings and doing things, but you know, in this film, some of the big press that’s coming out of it is that like Florence Pugh jumps off the second tallest building in the world and she was in a battle with Kevin Feige to let her do it and I’m thinking…
Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Yeah. They didn’t know if they could get insurance. She can’t do it.
Julia Cunningham: We can’t kill Florence Pugh.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus: Yeah, right. But exactly.
SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show is a live, one-hour pop culture and entertainment show airing weekdays at 3pm ET/12pm PT from the SiriusXM LA Studios on Radio Andy (Ch. 102), and anytime on the SiriusXM app. Disney’s Thunderbolts* opens in theaters May 2.
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