The marketing for Black Widow has teed up a big mystery in the movie: who is Taskmaster? As revealed in the trailers, the enigmatic metal-masked antagonist has taken charge of the Red Room and all its Black Widow assassins, so Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) have got to take him down to rescue their sisters. But who is the man behind the mask?
Though the promotional material for the film has kept this quiet, it’s actually become quite a well-known fact by now. Previously, star O-T Fagbenle shared a photo on Instagram using the Taskmaster hashtag, which he quickly deleted. Pairing this with the fact that his character, Mason, has been entirely absent from the trailers, and it paints a pretty conclusive picture. If you’re still not convinced though, the actor’s again practically let slip that he’s Black Widow’s new nemesis.
The British thesp shared an Instagram Live video this week in which he remotely chatted with a friend. If you follow the link at the bottom of the page and jump to around the 6-minute mark, you’ll see Fagbenle bring up the Marvel villain. “There’s a whole conspiracy theory that I’m Taskmaster.” His friend then replied, “you probably are.” Instead of denying it, the star said, “you’re trying to get it out as well? I thought we spoke about this, I thought we were going to keep some s*** on the DL.”
Like I said, the identity of Taskmaster has become an open secret by this point. Even without these social media slip-ups though, Mason is the prime candidate due to how he’s been kept out of the trailers, in a bid to wrong-foot the fans. To some extent this has worked, as some have suspected Rachel Weisz’s Melina in the past. There’s too much evidence that Taskmaster is male, however, for that to really add up. Not that Melina’s totally off the hook, mind you.
In any case, we’ll finally categorically find out the truth when, with any luck, Black Widow at last lands in theaters on November 6th.
