Florence Pugh recently told Fandango that she incessantly emailed Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about not using a stunt double for the filming of a “Thunderbolts*” scene in which her character, Yelena Belova, jumps off the second tallest building in the world. That would be the Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The building stands at 2,722 feet tall. Pugh loves heights and wanted to be the one to jump off.
“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. “I was like what the fuck? Of course we are! We have to do that.”
“I was being a sassy Karen emailing Kevin [Feige] and saying it’s going to do wonders for the press tour,” she continued. “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.”
Pugh added that jumping off the second tallest building in the world required such adrenaline that “I fell asleep for three hours after I did the stunt because my brain [went down].”
Tom Cruise famously scaled the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, during the filming of 2011’s “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.” That stunt remains one of the hallmarks of Cruise’s run as Ethan Hunt in the long-running action franchise.
Pugh is starring in “Thunderbolts*” opposite Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Geraldine Viswanathan, David Harbour, Hannah John-Kamen and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The Marvel tentpole centers on some of the MCU’s anti-heroes as they are forced to team up on a dangerous mission.
“Thunderbolts*” opens in theaters May 2 from Disney and Marvel Studios.
