We’ve all been conditioned to expect our superheroes to look a certain way, but getting into that kind of shape can take a huge toll on the body. One of the reasons that Hugh Jackman decided to give up playing Wolverine was that he was finding the training regime harder and harder to maintain the older he got, while Chris Hemsworth must have loved shooting Avengers: Endgame after finding out he got to spend the majority of the movie hidden under prosthetics.
Meanwhile, Robert Pattinson admitted that he’s pretty much given up working out altogether, and he’s playing Batman, so maybe in the future, more actors will take a leaf out of his book and decide that the sacrifice isn’t worth the reward. Black Widow star Florence Pugh certainly seems to be among them, with the Academy Award nominee revealing in a recent interview that while she was more than happy to do the training required to convincingly play a spy in a comic book blockbuster, she wasn’t going to try and turn herself into Henry Cavill’s Superman just for the sake of it.
“When I got the job, I wanted to know what the regime was. I wanted to know whether it was them or me calling the shots. That was a big deal for me. I didn’t want to be part of something where I was constantly checked on. And people making sure I was in the ‘right’ shape. That’s not me at all.”
From the footage we’ve seen so far from Black Widow, Pugh’s Yelena Belova looks to feature in more than her fair share of action scenes, and with the character rumored to be playing a bigger role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward, it seems like the 24 year-old has more than put the work in to transform herself into a believable graduate of the Red Room.
However, anyone with even a passing interest in the MCU knows full well that the hardest working person on these movies is invariably Scarlett Johansson’s stunt double, and with Pugh being roughly the size of a Dwayne Johnson cheat meal, there’s little reason for her to put herself through the physical wringer, not when there are plenty of professionals on set that are there specifically to do the heavy lifting so the stars don’t have to.
