Ayo Edebiri drops out of Marvel’s Thunderbolts, will be replaced by Geraldine Viswanathan
We don't know who she's playing, but she'll be joining a big gang of Marvel bad guys
There’s good news and bad news today for anyone looking forward to Marvel’s bad guy team-up movie Thunderbolts. First, the bad news: Ayo Edebriri, who seems to be universally beloved these days but also stars on The Bear, has dropped out of the film due to scheduling conflicts caused by delays from the Hollywood strikes over the summer. That makes Edebriri that second person to drop out of the movie for that reason, following Steven Yeun’s decision to leave the project earlier this month. But now the good news: Edebiri’s casting was first mentioned last year before she became the breakout star of everything everywhere, so there’s a fairly good chance you don’t even remember she was going to do this. No harm, no foul!
Deadline says Edebiri will be replaced by Geraldine Viswanathan from Miracle Workers and Ethan Coen’s upcoming Drive Away Dolls (where she stars opposite Margaret Qualley). We don’t know who Viswanathan will be playing, but based on this casting and the previous casting, it seems pretty likely that it will be some kind of funny character. That’ll be a good thing, since the rest of the characters in Thunderbolts are all going to be angsty antihero/villain-types, with Sebastian Stan playing the Winter Soldier, Florence Pugh playing Yelena Belova, David Harbour playing the Red Guardian (her Black Widow dad), Wyatt Russell as dirtbag Captain America knock-off U.S. Agent, Hannah John-Kamen as Ghost (from Ant-Man And The Wasp), and Olga Kurylenko as Taskmaster (the masked assassin woman from Black Widow).
Lewis Pullman will also be there, replacing Steven Yeun as someone who is maybe The Sentry, a Marvel character who has super-strength and flight and all the usual superhero tricks, but also he has a terrible connection to an evil being known as The Void. Seeing as how the Thunderbolts are basically Marvel’s version of the Suicide Squad, it would make perfect sense for them to fight a guy who is basically Marvel’s version of Superman.