Phase Four has proven to be a polarizing period for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but one thing that can’t be denied is that the franchise continues to knock it out of the park when it comes to its impeccable casting – with Disney Plus special Werewolf by Night carrying on in a vein that’s always been one of the superhero saga’s strongest suits.
Gael Garcia Bernal’s titular lycanthrope and Laura Donnelly’s Elsa Bloodstone are both excellent in their respective roles, treating the outlandish material with the utmost seriousness, while still leaning into the over-the-top nature of a black-and-white one-shot that’s designed to mimic the aesthetic of monster-driven serials from decades past.
Just because the standalone one-hour offering isn’t laden with Easter Eggs and cameos doesn’t mean it won’t be a key part of the MCU’s intertwining mythology moving forward, something that was alluded to by no less of an authority than Kevin Feige. Speaking to ComicBook, Donnelly admitted she’s been doing her research, and has big plans for Elsa that she’s hoping come to fruition.
“I would love to be able to delve more into her background going forward and I did do all of that, the reading and the research. I read Nextwave and I read her one-shot novel and things like that to get an idea of it and then I discussed with Michael [Giacchino], our director, how much of that we were keeping as truth for her character and how much we hadn’t decided on yet and things like that.
So yeah, there’s a lot of her background I think that stays true, but not all of it, and we find Elsa in a moment, where she has been away from her family and she has been kind of disengaged from that whole world, that her father brought her up in and now she’s coming back into it for the first time. So for me, that was so much more of an interesting way to be able to see that character for the first time as she’s coming back into a situation, particularly one that makes her very uncomfortable and in which she doesn’t know, in the context, she doesn’t really know who she is or where she belongs anymore. So that for me made it really interesting.”
There’s plenty of backstory to be filled in, especially when it looks as if the gem bearing her family’s name could turn out to be a powerful mystical MacGuffin as the Multiverse Saga progresses. Based on the reception to Werewolf by Night so far, we’d feel confident in saying we definitely haven’t seen the last of Donnelly.