By Ben Travis | Posted 17 Mar 2020

It’s been 10 years since Scarlett Johansson first played Black Widow, aka Natasha Romanoff. Ever since her debut appearance in Iron Man 2, she’s popped up across various Marvel Cinematic Universe movies – all four Avengers films, and a swathe of Captain America outings among them. Now she finally gets her own, with Black Widow zipping backwards a little in time to before – SPOILER WARNING – the character's noble sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame. According to director Cate Shortland, Romanoff’s movie arriving after audiences have seen her on-screen demise had its advantages.

“The timing] was really liberating,” the filmmaker tells Empire in the new _[Black Widow issue. “I wanted to give her justice. It gave us this feeling like, ‘I’ve got one chance and I really want people to understand her and to feel empathy for her,’ because often what you see is a very fetishised construct. We wanted to get under her skin.” That meant delving back into her past, and reuniting her with her former Russian ‘family’ – Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, Rachel Weisz’s Melina Vostokoff, and David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov.

For Johansson, it marks the culmination of a decade of storytelling and character building. “I don’t really have the perspective on it yet,” she says. “I think it will take some time for it to sink in. It’s been such a constant in my life for a decade of time. Every 18 months, coming back to this family and continuing the journey with everyone… I think we all probably have mixed feelings about it, at least in specific scenes, but I really had a sense of accomplishment [after shooting finished on Black Widow]. I feel like I tried it all this time around. I really got to go to all those uncomfortable places and explore certain recesses of her.”

Read Empire’s full Black Widow story in the new issue, available on newsstands and digitally via the Empire Magazine app from Thursday 19 March.