Florence Pugh has turned Yelena Belova into one of my favorite underrated Marvel characters and a standout addition to the post-Endgame MCU. She is deadly, deeply weird and capable of making a scene funny without ever seeming like she is trying particularly hard. That dry delivery has become such a big part of the character that I cannot really imagine Yelena without it. Turns out, we came surprisingly close to getting a very different version before the actress changed it to keep her character from being “boring,” and I’m so happy she did.
While revisiting scenes from her career for Vanity Fair, Pugh revealed that she initially rehearsed Black Widow using an English accent. Yelena is Russian in Marvel Comics, but that apparently was not how the studio and filmmakers originally approached the MCU’s version. One problem: She thought the character was painfully dull. Pugh explained:
When you start out with these movies, it’s obviously, the idea is that you want to go forward with that storyline. And I think we all didn’t really know what Yelena was. She was obviously written on the page in a specific way, and she needed color. And when we were in the rehearsal period, I was reading her aloud in an English accent, because I think that’s what it was supposed to be. She sounded so boring. I was like, ‘Oh, this girl, she’s going to be miserable.’
That is pretty devastating feedback on your own character. The breakthrough happened nowhere near Marvel Studios. According to the Oppenheimer star, she was home cooking dinner when she started trying the dialogue with a Russian accent. Suddenly, she found the Yelena we know:
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And then I remember I was at home once and I was cooking my dinner and I just decided to start doing some of the lines in a Russian accent. And she suddenly became funny and dry and witty and sarcastic. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s Russian.’ And so I went in the next day and I asked Cat and I said, ‘How would you feel if we changed her a little bit?’ And we did a few videos on her phone to send to Kevin and everybody was happy with that change.
“Everybody” included Black Widow director Cate Shortland and Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, who approved the adjustment. For me, the accent itself is almost secondary to what it apparently unlocked in the Little Women star. She said:
So, from that moment, I was able to actually create who Yelena is now, like the oddities, the weirdness, the weird timing. I was able to riff a bit more. I had more freedom in creating lines, moments. And it’s just so fascinating when you’re building a character and you’re given the space to. I was given the space to by Kevin and by Marvel to make her something special. And I’m so grateful that they allowed me to do that, because she’s totally bonkers.
Yelena mocking Natasha’s superhero pose in Black Widow, cheerfully eating macaroni with hot sauce in Hawkeye or calling Peter’s problems “small potatoes” in Brand New Day are moments when the actress lets Yelena be strange. She says ridiculous things with absolute sincerity. She has the gravitas to play deep loneliness in a movie like Thunderbolts*, then drop the funniest line as if she were at a dinner party, without missing a beat.
That personality has clearly stuck. Yelena has since appeared in quite a few Marvel movies and shows, with Feige also saying she has a significant role in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. All because Pugh got bored during rehearsals and started doing Russian dialogue over dinner. Sometimes character development apparently happens in the kitchen.
Yelena’s next appearance in a new MCU movie is in Avengers: Doomsday, which lands on the 2026 movie calendar on December 18. As for Florence Pugh’s next big role, it is in the upcoming Netflix series, East of Eden. The new page-to-screen adaptation of the beloved John Steinbeck classic hits the streamer on October 1, 2026.
