Florence Pugh is an oddball. Her career ranges from arthouse horror to multimillion dollar popcornbait, and the newest addition to her filmography adds even more variety to Pugh’s archive. Thunderbolts* is the new smash hit film from Marvel Studios, starring Florence Pugh as the enigmatic Yelena Belova.
The movie star sits opposite me, drinking a can of sugar free Monster and smoking a Marlboro red. Anytime that she looks at me I immediately start blushing, and so to try and calm myself I slouch low in the chair and look at the ceiling. It is cut into oblong sections with orange pipes, contrasting against the concrete gray of the rest of the ceiling.
“Do you have any questions?” she asks. I glance down.
The pipes must transport some form of gas or liquid. Yet there are so many pipes, could they all transport the same thing? I could just make out the sound of pumping, it must be coming from another room.
“Florence. What’s the deal with your dad’s café making a £900,000 loss? Does he not know how to make a cup of tea?”
“I’m not talking about that. Do you ask other people about their fathers businesses?”
“Well, yeah, but look – I’m sorry. I’m a bit nervous.” I say. I notice there’s a pipe against one of the far walls that is insulated. Would this be to keep the contents of the pipe warm or cold? I guessed it was heat due to the placement of the pipe as if it was meant to be kept cool it would be placed at the bottom of the wall, maybe even beneath our feet. I wondered if there were other pipes beneath where we sat. Where does it all go?
“Florence, have you seen Hot Ones?”
“Yes, I’ve been on Hot Ones.” she says impatiently. I look back at her.
“We’re going to try doing our own activity as part of this interview. Its to add a bit of flair, relax yourself, gives the interviewer something to riff off. How does that sound?”
“Okay, what are we doing?”
“We’re going to find out what the deal is with all these pipes.” I say.
We begin walking through the facility with flashlights, following the pipes running along the ceiling.
“So in this new movie, Thunderbolts, you jump off the world’s second tallest building. Was the world’s first tallest building not good enough?”
“No it actually fits in the story, if you watch the movie you’ll find out.”
“Do you have any funny stories?”
“Like what happened on set?”
“Okay.” I say. We go through a set of double doors and up some stairs. This section of the facility appeared entirely abandoned, though the pumping sound was much louder.
“Right, one day we were shooting this chase scene, I was with Sebastian and Wyatt and Jake, the director, he yells action. But we all had our airpods in and couldn’t hear him.”
“Do you think these pipes are carrying a gas or a liquid?”
“Maybe a solid.”
“It won’t be a solid.” I say.
“Why not?”
“How does a solid pass through a pipe?”
“Maybe it doesn’t need to pass through, maybe it needs to be solid.” she says. I stop.
“You know what, you may be onto something. Rather than being a way of transporting something…”
“The pipes act as a structure which a solid can exist throughout a larger structure.” she says, looking at me. I examine her eyebrows. These eyebrows have won awards. Each hair on each eyebrow is perfect. These are the eyebrows sent from heaven.
“We better keep moving.” I say, getting flustered. We follow the corridor to where the pumping is coming from.
We enter a room so big that we couldn’t see to the other side. It went on and on into blackness. The beams from our lights cut across thousands of pipes, they streamed out of the wall behind us and towards a central mass.
“What is it?” I whisper. We walk towards it, seeing the pipes connect, becoming larger and larger, wrapping around a core. The pumping noise was slow, repetitive, a percussive clunking then a hiss. Florence and I crawl along the floor beneath the nest of pipes, condensation speckled across the orange metal tubes that now surround us. In front of us was a huge pumping device, a metal neck connecting to a shaft of chrome, slowly moving up and down. We watch the machine pumping.
“Have you played Balatro then?”
“Us celebrities already have Balatro 2. We’re much more technologically advanced than your average human.”
“Can I have a go?”
“No.” she says. We both look up at the machine.
Thunderbolts is in cinemas now! When getting your ticket use the promo code 'PILE20' to receive 20 free tickets. Enjoy!
