Every character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has at least one iconic scene that defines the character. For Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, that scene might be the first time we see the character in The Avengers. She’s tied to a chair, and yet what follows is one of the best action sequences in the entire movie. Interestingly, the hardest part of the scene for the actress wasn’t the action, it was the language.
Looking back at the moment with Vanity Fair, Johansson gives most of the credit to her stunt double, Heidi Moneymaker. The actress says that due to the constraints of the scene, being tied to a chair, she was simply unable to do most of what was required. She explained…
A lot of this fight, I couldn’t perform, because I’m tied to a chair, and it’s actually like, really burdensome. The incomparable Heidi Moneymaker, who’s my stunt double for all the Avengers films, and she is an incredible athlete, amazing performer. She knows me so well. She knows my capabilities so well, because we’ve worked together since I was in Iron Man 2. I was like 23 or 24, for a decade of time. We, together, created Black Widow and her style and her gate and all of the flourishes that come with her fight style and stuff like that.
While stunt people are supposed to remain hidden, as Johasson points out, even simple movements can give away the truth, so the actor and stunt people have to work together to create the character.
While many actors do a lot of their own stunts, and Tom Cruise does them all, Scarlett Johansson does some, while letting the talented stunt team take care of the rest. ScarJo may not have been the person we see in camera in most of the action sequence, but there are certainly shots that are clearly her. She went on to discuss how she worked with the stunt team to decide what parts of the fight scene she would do, and how the complete sequence blended her and her stunt double together. She continued…
So probably a lot of this chair sequence – the stunt team has done this amazing previz, and then you would work out what pieces that you would be able to be capable of doing and what pieces the stunt performer would be doing. And it kind of becomes a marriage of those two things.
It certainly sounds like all this was a complicated sequence to put together. One can imagine that fighting while tied down would be a unique position even for a professional stuntperson. Having said that, Scarlett Johansson says the hardest part of the whole scene wasn’t the stunts, it was learning to speak a few lines of Russian. She said…
I do remember how challenging it was to learn the like, four-and-a-half seconds of Russian. That to me was probably more difficult than the stunt, if that makes any sense. It was like [a] mental stunt. I was way more stressed about the Russian than the chair.
To be fair, trying to not only learn to pronounce a few lines in a language you don’t speak, but also do it in a way that sounds like you do speak it, is probably not easy.
Scarlett Johansson is done with the MCU, unless she returns in a new role like Robert Downey Jr. But we'll always have these great scenes to remember her and Black Widow.
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