One Key Thunderbolts Scene Finally Tells Us More About Marvel’s Anti-Nick Fury

This article contains spoilers for “Marvel’s Thunderbolts.” 

From a strict power standpoint, the primary antagonist of “Marvel’s Thunderbolts” is Robert “Bob” Reynolds’ (Lewis Pullman), whose superhero incarnation Sentry and his destructive dark side, the Void, are the most powerful opponents the titular team faces. However, the closest thing the movie has to an overarching Big Bad is CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). This is an interesting development because de Fontaine has been slowly taking over Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) role as the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s primary spymaster in recent years. Both are known for heading a shadowy intelligence agency, share the tendency to build powerful protection tools that they can control — de Fontaine has the Sentry Project, Fury tinkered with Project Insight in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” — and have been known to use costumed vigilantes for dangerous missions. 

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Considering these similarities, it’s interesting that “Thunderbolts” goes out of its way to build de Fontaine into an anti-Nick Fury. Like Fury, she’s a capable commander who’s hard as nails, but her leadership is undermined by unsavory traits like haughtiness and desire for personal power. Unlike Fury, she lacks the luxury of working outside government jurisdiction and proves wholly unable to brow-beat politicians into submission. Instead, she has to scramble and improvise throughout the movie to avoid impeachment. And unlike Fury, she’s also completely willing to sacrifice her own people and assets to save her behind. All of this gives de Fontaine a unique combination of ruthlessness and cleverness that allows Louis-Dreyfus to portray the character as a combination of a cruel gamemaster and a “Veep”-style leader who’s consistently out of her depth … and one scene in “Thunderbolts” finally offers us clues on the inner workings of the mysterious Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. 

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Since the movie revolves around de Fontaine scrambling to hide evidence of the Sentry Project and various off-the-books wetworks operatives, it makes sense that it largely steers clear of making her sympathetic — especially since the Thunderbolts team gets its start when she sics Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) against each other and attempts to incinerate them. However, when Bob turns out to have superpowers and she takes him to the Watchtower in New York, we get a brief scene that reveals more about her than she probably would have liked. 

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During a bedside conversation, de Fontaine touches Bob and is subjected to one of the vivid bad memory flashbacks that are part of the Void’s power set. Here, we learn that her father was an overconfident crook who got caught up in something big and was shot in front of her eyes by another shady figure, who then took her under his wing. This brief scene explains a lot about de Fontaine’s own amorality and callousness — she’s her father’s daughter, after all — and suggests that whatever conditions she grew up in can’t have been good. In other words, de Fontaine has been directed toward the path of a ruthless power player by both nature and nurture. What’s more, while she does seem very comfortable in her own skin as a CIA director, it’s pretty telling that Bob’s touch specifically sends people to experience their absolute worst memories, and the experience is enough to briefly crack the usually unflappable de Fontaine’s facade.  

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Compare de Fontaine’s brief flashback with Nick Fury’s backstory, which has unfolded over the course of numerous MCU projects — chiefly “Captain Marvel” and the Disney+ miniseries “Secret Invasion” — and you’ll find that sometimes, less really is more. Fury’s story, after all, is a very straightforward “military man to spy” situation right up until he crosses paths with the Skrulls and Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) in “Captain Marvel,” and uses these new contacts to start growing his power base. 

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Fury’s tragedies are those of an action hero, and his career path is that of a movie character. This doesn’t make Fury a bad character — on the contrary, he’s a very good one, as the MCU goes. Still, simply by taking an extra moment to offer a glimpse into de Fontaine’s past, “Thunderbolts” goes a long way toward establishing her as a far more three-dimensional figure than Fury ever was … and after the flashback scene, her comments about the world consisting of bad and worse people hit very, very differently than they would without seeing it.

“Thunderbolts” is an emotional gut punch through and through. While the movie’s exciting post-credits scenes and the vast powers of Marvel’s dark Sentry, the Void, might occasionally distract from its heavy mental health themes, scenes like de Fontaine’s flashback add layers to the movie that will no doubt reward the viewer during a rewatch. 

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