Taika Waititi may be all about spontaneity, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a perfectionist.
The “Thor: Love and Thunder” writer/director confirmed multiple cut scenes featuring Jeff Goldblum and Peter Dinklage, plus Lena Headey’s MCU debut, as the takes were not “good enough” to make it into the final feature. Goldblum and Dinklage previously played the Grandmaster and Eitri in the intergalactic Marvel installments.
“I’m not going to give you a moment because this is my way of telling you, like, people say, ‘I can’t wait for the deleted scenes with those actors,'” Waititi told Insider. “I don’t want people to see the deleted scenes because they’re deleted for a reason: They aren’t good enough. The scenes were not in the movie and that’s it.”
So don’t expect a hashtag to start trending anytime soon. The final version is the cut Waititi wants out there.
“I wrote the thing so when you cut anything it’s a little bit of a challenge to yourself because you’re like, ‘Am I not that good? Should I have seen this coming?’ But every film I’ve done I’ve probably cut the same amount out,” the Oscar winner continued. “When you go into the edit you just never know. A scene on its own could be the most funniest thing or intriguing thing, but sometimes those things if you keep them in will just make the movie screech to a halt. So you have to do what’s best for the film.”
He added, “And if you ask any of those actors who were cut out — Jeff Goldblum, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage — they all understand how it works. They have been in the game long enough. But that’s just the way I look at things.”
Understanding and acceptance are two different things, though. Headey’s cut role in “Love and Thunder” led to a $1.5 million lawsuit filed by her former U.K. agency Troika against her. The suit claims Headey owes the agency, now rebranded as YMU, unpaid commission fees upwards of $500,000 or 7 percent of her salary for “Thor: Love and Thunder.” The “Game of Thrones” alum issued a statement claiming Waititi approached her directly and there was no involvement by Troika.
“Thor: Love and Thunder” star Natalie Portman exclusively told IndieWire that even she found it “surprising” just how much Waititi scrapped.
“There were whole sequences, planets, characters, and worlds that didn’t end up in the movie that were hilarious and amazing and [that] we spent a lot of time and energy on, and certainly the entire crew also designing and conceiving,” Portman said. “It’s just amazing how much great material is not in the film, considering how much great material is in it. Usually, it’s like, you’re just trying to get enough good stuff to put in the film, and this had overflow. So that was really surprising.”
She added, “Taika was pretty gutsy about just letting us seriously change the plot because of certain choices we made in the scene and certain places we decided to go. Some of it was right and some of it was not right. Some of it ended up in the film, some of it did not, but it was pretty incredible to get to play and to get to have that latitude in the emotional stuff, as well as the comedic stuff.”
