Earlier this spring, “Iron Man 3” director Shane Black revealed why Rebecca Hall’s character was seriously underutilized in the film, and now Hall has spoken on the subject as well.
As Women and Hollywood previously reported, Rebecca Hall’s character, Maya Hansen, and female super-soldier Brandt (Stéphanie Szostak) were tragically underdeveloped and ignored in the 2013 film because of toys and merchandising.
As Black explained, “Szostak’s character was bigger at one point and we reduced it. Rebecca Hall’s character was bigger at one point and we reduced it…All I’ll say is this, on the record: There was an early draft of ‘Iron Man 3’ where we had an inkling of a problem. Which is that we had a female character who was the villain in the draft. We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female.”
Now, in a new interview with the Toronto Sun, Hall has confirmed Black’s take, and shared her disappointment in how the movie turned out.
“That’s 100 percent true,” Hall said at TIFF this week. “I’ve been gagging to talk about it with someone, but I haven’t had the opportunity, weirdly.”
The revelation that she would be killed off came as a a shock that she had to work through.
“I signed on to do something that was a substantial role. She wasn’t entirely the villain — there have been several phases of this — but I signed on to do something very different to what I ended up doing. Halfway through shooting they were basically like, ‘What would you think if you just got shot out of nowhere?’ I was meant to be in the movie until the end… I grappled with them for awhile and then I said, ‘Well, you have to give me a decent death scene and you have to give me one more scene with Iron Man,’ which Robert Downey Jr. supported me on.”
But Hall added that Marvel is making moves to remedy their utter lack of female superheroes and women in significant roles.
“Look, (Marvel) is paying for their mistakes right now,” she said, “and I applaud them for casting Brie Larson in ‘Captain Marvel.’ Hallelujah. It’s about time women started being the heroes of things. Hall added, “They can also be the anti-heroes of the things.”
