BLACK WIDOW Writer Talks About Taskmaster and Why They Handled the Character the Way They Did
Black Widow ended up playing with the villain Taskmaster in a different and unexpected way. While they took some aspect of the character from the comics, like how it perfectly mimics people’s fighting style, the person behind the mask isn’t the same person in the comics.
In the comics, the character was a guy named Tony Masters, but in the film, Taskmaster turned out to be Antonia Dreykov, the daughter of Red Room mastermind General Dreykov. This direction ended up tying the character directly to Natasha's dark past. She thought she killed Antonia as a young girl when Natasha used her as bait to get to Dreykov so she could blow him up. Antonia was considered collateral damage.
I actually like the direction they took with this character. It worked great for the story, and now writer Eric Pearson is opening up about Taskmaster and explains why they changed things up for the movie. He reveals that at one point they actually did have a Tony Masters character as Taskmaster!
"There was a previous draft where it was a Tony Masters character. It was hard because we had certain things that we knew certain constants. One of the constants was we were right after Captain America: Civil War and before Avengers: Infinity War which meant our great threat, the Red Room... One of the bigger kind of complications was figuring out a villain plot that could succeed and go unnoticed, which ultimately, I think kind of works out for a spy thriller film and also for Dreykov as an ultimate villain because he is a bit of a cowardly man who wields power from the shadows, but spends most of his time isolated, like a weird Howard Hughes, just talking about how big he is to himself because he's too scared to actually kind of like get out there in the world.
"Tony Masters didn't seem to really fit into that. And meanwhile, we had this mystery of 'What happened to Dreykov's daughter?' And I don't know it seemed like because Natasha Romanoff's story is always going to be more grounded, but you still want some Marvel fun fantastic in it."
Pearson when on to talk about the idea of connecting Taskmaster’s story to Black Widow’s saying:
"The idea of an accident going wrong and we've already got this facility now in the Red Room that is constantly with working on and the idea of mind control and rebuilding and controlling the human brain. The idea of an accident going wrong with a loved one and using the technology to reconstruct that person's mind finding something new, finding the photographic reflexes in rebuilding that mind that felt like a good Marvel comic book addition to an otherwise more grounded spy thriller thing."
What did you think about how Taskmaster was utilized in Black Widow?
Source: CB