SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments, including the ending, of Marvel Studios’ “Thunderbolts*,” currently playing in theaters.
The climactic battle in “Thunderbolts*” is unlike any other Marvel Studios movie in its 17 year history. Throughout the film, whenever members of the titular ad-hoc antihero team come into physical contact with Bob Reynolds (Lewis Pullman), they find themselves suddenly sucked inside the memory of one of their greatest shames. For Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), it’s when she lured her friend to her death as her first test for the Red Room. For John Walker (Wyatt Russell), it’s sniping at his wife and neglecting his crying son in the aftermath of his disgrace during the events of 2021’s “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” For Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), it’s witnessing her father’s murder as a young girl.
In the film’s final act, the Thunderbolts discover these memories are caused by Bob’s transformation into the all-powerful superhero Sentry and his self-nullifying alter ego, the Void, who begins subsuming New York City and all its residents into total darkness. After Yelena voluntarily steps inside that darkness, she fights her way through her darkest memories to find Bob trapped inside a shame room connected to his abusive childhood. The rest of the Thunderbolts — including Bucky (Sebastian Stan), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and Alexei (David Harbour) — join Yelena inside the Voice to help Bob fight through all of his shame rooms and, hopefully, out of the Void entirely.
Eventually, they arrive at Bob’s memory of the Malaysian science lab where he volunteered for the scientific experimentation to turn him into a superhero — the same lab Yelena destroys at the start of the film. Bob attacks the Void, which only makes it stronger; it’s not until Yelena and the Thunderbolts embrace Bob and let him know he’s not alone that he’s able to escape the Void and return New York back to normal.
This entire sequence is shot by director Jake Schreier (“Paper Towns,” “Beef”) and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (“The Green Knight,” “Moon Knight”) with a handheld, hand-made aesthetic that evokes A24 films like “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and indie classics like “Being John Malkovich.”
“Kevin [Feige] said, ‘Make it different — do it in camera if you can,’” Schreier says of the Marvel Studios chief. “We thought it would be fun to do a practical rendition of what getting stuck in a thought loop or a shame room would be.”
Schreier talked with Variety about designing the shame rooms — including the shame rooms that didn’t make the film — as well as his personal inspiration for Bob’s character and how much he was involved with the post-credits scene that sets up the team’s role in 2026’s “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Sebastian Stan and director Jake Schreier on the set of “Thunderbolts*.”
Chuck Zlotnick / Marvel Studios
When did you shoot the end credit scene?
That was shot maybe four weeks ago, and I did not direct that. That’s the Russos on the set of “Avengers: Doomsday.” I got to be there, which was very fun, to watch your buddies go on to this grander scale.
Did you have a sense that Sam Wilson was going to be suing them for using the name “Avengers”?
I got to see drafts, for sure. We all worked on the scene just to make sure that it was honest to where our characters were. But also, you’re giving them over to this whole new world and new scope, and you want them to function in that way. It was fun to see them directed in another context and on a different level of scope than we had been treating it.
Which came first, having Sentry/the Void in your movie, or wanting to explore themes of loneliness and depression in a Marvel film?
Sentry/The Void was in it. [Screenwriter] Eric Pearson and [executive producer] Brian Chapek had found that together. It’s just who that character is, and what [comic book writer] Paul Jenkins did in introducing him — and we talked to him — it was always a parable for mental health. It just felt like such an interesting opportunity to bring over some of the ideas that we had been exploring in “Beef” and see if they could work in an even larger scale.
A lot of the discourse about how where things are in the world today revolves around a generation of young men who are desperately lost and alone and depressed. How much of that was on your mind as you were exploring those themes in this movie?
Once it became Lewis’s role, and we started working together and talking about it, and you would just see these moments that felt resonant in that way. It wasn’t really an intent to speak to that. But I think, like, as we made it, it felt like, oh, there is some resonance there. We never wanted to kind of lecture anyone or pander to anything, but just make it feel honest. I mean, to me, that character was always based on a friend of mine who has gone through a lot of this stuff, and would have these very high highs, and would always bring in this very self-destructive quality underneath it. He really needed to learn how to exist within the middle of that and be okay with being himself.
I mean, the last thing that I would want to do is make anyone feel lectured to, or make some overt message more than hoping that everyone who sees themselves in the movie feels understood on some level. It’s really about what connections you can find, this idea that in the wrong hands, someone going through those things can be spun in the way that Val does [to Bob] and led down a darker path — versus, if you make a real connection with someone, there’s a sounder way out of that.
What was the process of designing the shame rooms and what would be inside of them?
That was something that we really deepened. At first it was like, Well, we can’t beat this guy on the outside, obviously, so there has to be some internal resolution. Brian Chapek came up with the idea of going into the Void. And given that Kevin [Feige] had said, “Go out there and make it different — do it in camera if you can,” [we thought] it would be fun to do a practical rendition of what getting stuck in a thought loop or a shame room would be. It was really when [“Beef” creator] Sonny [Lee] came in and did multiple drafts, and working with Grace Yun, our production designer on both “Beef” and this, that we got into the specifics of what those rooms would be. [Screenwriter] Joanna [Calo] picked up on that and took it even further in terms of getting back to that initial room that we find Yelena in in the beginning of the movie, and making that this callback of the idea that the greatest shame of all was thinking that you could be something bigger than yourself, that his aspirations towards heroism are actually what brings everything down and that you need to learn to be OK with who you are without that.
We see Bob, Elena, Walker and Val’s shame rooms. Did you explore at all what Bucky or Ava or Alexei’s shame rooms would look like?
I was very sad not to not to get to see especially Alexei’s shame room. Yeah, we tried. There was a time when the finale became an escape through all of their shame rooms, and I think that would have been very fun. But something Joanna really spoke up for was needing to have a Big Bad moment before they got out of the Void. And if it’s going to lead to the heart of the Void, then it felt like it was more important to take a journey through Bob’s shame rooms — as much as I am very sad not to have gotten to get in every character’s past.
How far did you get into thinking about what that would look like?
We got pretty far. We have full animatic, storyboarded sequences of all kinds of different versions of the end of this movie.
Can you tell me a little bit about what those would’ve been?
We had Alexei in the gulag, I think, having been thrown in there. I believe Ghost’s was about her time in the orphanage, and being this girl that no one wanted to be around — to be able to be invisible and see the way that you’re perceived and no one wanting to associate with you felt very sad. We had a lot of different Bucky ones. We always wanted to do something a little less than the expected idea. There’s some very obvious things for Bucky, but I think at one point, Joanna had written something around some shameful moment in Boy Scout camp. But I don’t know that that would have really been the right path for it. That’s the nice thing with working with these actors — they’re such invested, caring guardians of their characters and their arcs that they’ll let you know something feels false or not right to them.
How did you work the actors on sorting through what their shame rooms mean for them and how they understand what they’re seeing?
Anything when you’re doing practical, in camera effects — like, there’s just head turn transitions and match cuts — I think the actors are all a little like, “Are you sure, man? Is this it?” And it’s like, “No, I think it’ll work.” I love what Joanna wrote for Walker. It does speak to that terrible moment from “Falcon and Winter Soldier” — not in going back to that moment, but more in going to what those kind of moments do to us. The idea of seeing a character like that in this strikingly small, very relatable domestic situation might feel like an even better jolt into the emotion of what that can do to you.
For a long time, this movie wasn’t supposed to come out at the beginning of May. What was your reaction when you realized this movie is now launching the summer season, and it’s a blockbuster about shame and depression and loneliness?
[Laughs] Look, I’m just here to make the movie. Kevin had said from the beginning, “Make it different,” so I never felt like I was running away with something. I said from the beginning, “I don’t want this to be the weird one.” We did this movie with the collaboration and support of everyone at the studio who have made all of these other movies that are so great. The hope was that you get to the end of this and it’s got all the action, all the explosions and all the humor that you expect from a Marvel summer movie. And then, yeah, the other side of it goes to a more internal place, but when you get to that post-credit sequence, even though you got there along a very different path than you might have been expecting, it lives up to the legacy of those films. Hopefully, we were successful in doing that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.