Florence Pugh on Thunderbolts Tackling Depression, Avengers: Doomsday

Florence Pugh might have daredevil in her DNA.

At last summer’s San Diego Comic-Con, Pugh revealed that she had a major stunt in “Thunderbolts”: jumping off the second tallest building in the world, Merdeka, a 118-story skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It’s the type of terrifying feat that would freak most grandparents out, but Pugh’s grandmother, affectionately called “Granzo Pat,” didn’t seem to bat an eyelash during the London premiere of the Marvel movie.

“She loved the movie. She said, ‘Brilliant, darling. Very thrilling,’ but I didn’t ask her what she thought of the jump,” Pugh tells Variety in Los Angeles a few days later. “She’s also crazy, like she’s someone that does some pretty mad stuff, so maybe she just thought that was a walk in the park.”

With the once-in-a-lifetime stunt, Pugh adds “Guinness World Record holder” to her already impressive resume, but she didn’t do it for the personal glory. “I wanted to do that stunt because I knew that it meant that we all got to do it. Like, yes, I got to jump off the second-tallest building in the world, but so did we all,” Pugh says of sharing the record with longtime Marvel stunt coordinator Heidi Moneymaker and base jumper Katie Hansen. “That day in Malaysia was an achievement for all of us. We all got to say that we worked on that stunt, and what an impressive and powerful way to start a movie!”

Indeed, the freefall underscores the idea that “Thunderbolts*,” in theaters now, is a totally different kind of Marvel movie — one that uses its action to alert the audience that Pugh’s kick-ass mercenary Yelena Belova is not really enjoying her job. That’s the early vibe of director Jake Schreier’s superhero team-up movie, which assembles a crew of antiheroes — Black Widow agent Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh); Bucky Barnes, a.k.a. the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan); Russian super soldier — and Yelena’s adopted…