Be warned that what you are about to read might be considered a spoiler if you have not yet bought a ticket to see Black Widow in theaters or spent $30 on top of a subscription to stream it on Disney+.
With that out of the way, director Cate Shortland revealed an interesting behind-the-scenes moment while discussing the film with Polygon. When Shortland, Scarlett Johansson, and Florence Pugh first read Black Widow’s script, they collectively rolled their eyes at the sexist joke David Harbour’s Alexi (the Red Guardian) cracks about women being in bad moods during their periods.
“I remember Florence and Scarlett and I reading it and just being like, ‘Oh, my God, this is ridiculous,’” Shortland said. Initially, she wanted to cut it entirely, but after discussing it with the actors, they decided to “answer it.”
“If you’re gonna make that joke, I’m gonna unleash Florence Pugh on you,” Shortland said.
In the Marvel world, girls groomed to become “Widows” (e.g. assassins) in the evil General Dreykov’s “Red Room” are sterilized to prevent them from having biological children, thus preventing attachments that could impede their nefarious and dangerous work. This fact was revealed in Avengers: Age of Ultron in a dialogue between Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff and Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner.
So in the new film, when Harbour’s boorish, puffed-chest aging superhero Alexi asks Pugh’s Yelena if her aggression is due to “that time of the month” she belts him one back.
“I don’t get my period dipshit. I don’t have a uterus,” she says.
“Or ovaries,” Johansson’s Romanoff adds.
Pugh’s character then goes into rich detail about the involuntary hysterectomy (“they just get right in there and chop them all away”) until Harbour relents and backs off.
“What we tried to do was use humor to talk to the trauma,” Shortland told Polygon.
It was one of her favorite moments in the film, she noted.
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