Should Florence Pugh star in whatever the next Mission: Impossible movie is? I ask because she’s giving Tom Cruise a run for his money by jumping off the second-tallest building in the world in a clip for Marvel’s upcoming antihero action romp Thunderbolts*. Speaking with Fandango, Pugh said she bombarded Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about not using a stunt double for the scene in Thunderbolts* when Yelena leaps into action from the top of the Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The building is an intimidating 2,722 feet tall, and Pugh loves heights. Insurance woes be damned because she wanted that thrill for herself.
“I got on all the emails. It was in the script, and then slowly as we got closer and closer to shooting, they said they don’t think it’s going to happen because it’s a crazy insurance ordeal and obviously we’re not going to throw [me] off the second tallest building in the world,” Pugh said during an interview with Fandango. “I was like what the fuck? Of course we are! We have to do that.”
Continuing to explain how she convinced Feige to take a leap of faith, Pugh added, “I was being a sassy Karen emailing Kevin [Feige] and saying it’s going to do wonders for the press tour. We have to do this! We’re going to have three women break three different Guinness World Records and we’ll do this and this. I had to keep on pushing and then they’re like, ‘Okay, if you want to fall off the second tallest building, we’ll figure it out for you.’ I don’t mind heights. I quite like them and enjoy them, but that was a whole different ballgame and insane. The mental control I had to do that day was its own super power.”
Extreme action fans could recall the lead-up to Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, when clips of Tom Cruise scaling the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, went viral. As impressive as that remains, something special about Pugh casually and majestically falling from the Merdeka 118 blows my mind. Unlike Pugh, I’m not too fond of heights. I can handle them, but I’d never jump from the side of a building or plane.
Thunderbolts* is the next Marvel outing, with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) forced to unite on a dangerous mission. Lewis Pullman plays Bob, a superpower individual also known as The Sentry. Julia Louis-Dreyfus also returns as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who seems to be pulling the strings behind the scenes.
