TheAvengers: Infinity SagaBox set continues to make waves across the MCU fandom, thanks to the number of deleted clips and behind-the-scenes videos the collection provides relating to the decade long Marvel saga beginning with the originalIron Manand culminating withEndgame. One such scene from the collection posted on Reddit recently features an obviously pregnant Black Widow talking to Steve Rogers in the aftermath ofAvengers: Age of Ultron.
Before you get confused and start trying to recall ifAvengers: Age of Ultronhad included a pregnant Natasha Romanoff story arc, this is a shot from the movie before CGI was used to remove the baby bump from Widow’s sleek leather outfit.Scarlett Johansson was pregnantduring the filming of the movie, which means the makers had to get creative to hide her bump without resorting to CGI in every scene she was in.
For instance, in one scene,Natasha is flirting with Bruce Bannerduring the party at Avengers mansion. She is seen standing behind the bar throughout the conversation, so the counter hides her bump. Later at the party, while the rest of the Avengers are trying to lift Thor’s hammer, Widow is pointedly kept sitting in a way that hides her stomach.
During another scene, when Ultron keeps Widow prisoner, their conversation takes place while Widow is sitting in the shadowy depths of a prison cell, yet another convenient location to keep her body below the chest in the dark.
Of course, all these tricks don’t work during the action scenes, which Johansson could hardly be expected to do while hiding behind a desk or sitting in a chair. It was for those scenes that CGI was used to hide the fact that the Avengers were using an ordinary woman with no superpowers who also happened to be pregnant to combat a murderous army of psychopathic robots.
Johansson’s condition during the shooting for the film is even more ironic in hindsight since the movie’s main arc for Black Widow was her having to come to terms with the fact that theassassin’s school she was trained atperformed a surgery which rendered her infertile and unable to bear children. It must have been a difficult scene where Widow is sharing this fact with her love interest Bruce, while both actors were acutely conscious of the baby bump sported by Johansson during the scene.
Interestingly, this is not the only time this happened in recent superhero films.Wonder Womanstar Gal Gadot was pregnant during the reshoots for her title film. During those shoots, she had to do action-packed scenes relating to the No Man’s Land portion of the movie where Diana reveals herself to man’s world for the first time and leads the charge against the Germans. A green sash was placed over the bump in her outfit which was later removed through CGI. This first appeared onReddit.
Scarlett Johansson pregnant in a scene from Age of Ultron (from Infinity Saga Box Set) from r/marvelstudios
