Fans have been clamoring for Taskmaster for years, and Black Widow finally introduces that character, albeit with certain changes from her comic counterpart. When did you decide to make that character Dreykov’s daughter rather than Tony Masters, like in the comics?
Eric Pearson: That was in building the script, earlier in pre-production. It made sense in building the villainous threat that is the present-day version of the Red Room and Dreykov as an “in the shadows” threat. Because we were dealing with the time period between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, we needed a threat from the villains that could potentially succeed, but in success would go unnoticed. So that worked for Natasha’s spy-thriller genre character, and with the idea of the Red Room and the Widows under their control, we began toying around with the notion of deconstructing the human brain. We knew we had Taskmaster, this very physical villain. I just started seeing the pieces of the puzzle I had.
We had a mystery of Dreykov’s daughter that we’ve got to answer. We’ve got Dreykov, as a person, has the ability to take apart and rebuild the human mind. We’ve got a dark secret from Natasha’s past, something that she’s ashamed of, something that she must confront. What if that backstory came together in a way where the comic-book science seemed to work that if Natasha’s dark secret was that she intentionally harmed a young girl as a means to an end, something for the world (for herself, and for her defection to S.H.I.E.L.D.), the comic-book science is this guy who has the ability to rebuild the brain and what if he tries to save his daughter and discovers the photographic reflexes in rebuilding the mind, and turns Antonia into this Terminator-like Taskmaster villain? Everything I described in the last minute took a couple of weeks of discussion as we went over it, but that’s how it came about.
