When casting was first announced for Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, we saw that the majority of the main players were MCU veterans that had been in at least one other film, many of them several projects, except for one.
Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead, Beef) was set to play the newcomer, Bob, who turned out to be the character The Sentry. Unfortunately, due to the strikes a couple of years ago, that messed with many filming schedules, and Yeun had to drop out of the role due to other commitments.
In a recent interview with the film’s director, Jake Schreier, he talked about the process of scrambling last minute to find a suitable replacement actor to take on the mysterious role.
Schreier explained to The New York Times:
“I think the hardest part is that they don’t get to read a script. That’s a big leap for any actor to take. I met up with Lewis back in L.A. and we were scrambling because I think we were maybe a month out at that point.
“I basically gave him the oral history of Thunderbolts because I wasn’t allowed to give him the script, but it’s like, ‘I will tell you the whole story, I will show you the concept art, I’ll show you the animatics.’ I just really tried to show him how interesting the character could be and why it would be worth taking that leap.”
He went on:
“These things are so secretive. Also, I think there is this trust that we’ll get in there and we’ll figure it out together. Something Kevin [Feige] always talks about is you can never come into a Marvel meeting at any point of the process and say, ‘I think we’re done, I think this is it.’
“It’s always, ‘This is good. Here’s how we think we can make it better.’ Lewis absolutely got to be part of the development, and he and Florence worked on the scenes. We rewrote stuff, made it work better and fit the role to him.”
I had been looking forward to seeing Yeun in the MCU, but Pullman did a fantastic job, and I loved what he brought to the character. Hopefully Yeun will be able to fill another role in the future.
Schreier went on to say that he was “apprehensive” about taking Bob to such dark places, but praised Marvel Studios and Feige for “pushing me toward making it different than what they had done.”
“If you have the Sentry and the Void [the Sentry’s villainous alter ego] in your movie, you’re going to have to go there. We talked to Paul Jenkins, who created the character, and it always was a parable for mental health.
“Also, he is extraordinarily overpowered and his only kryptonite is that there’s this Void side to him. If you’re going to make any movie that works with that character in it, it’s going to have some amount of internal conflict that works as well as the external conflict,” the filmmaker concluded.
The Sentry will return in Avengers: Doomsday, set to hit theaters on May 1, 2026, alongside his fellow New Avengers.
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