Werewolf By Night director wanted Elsa Bloodstone to be less hypersexual and more of a "real person"

While She-Hulk: Attorney At Law aimed to please crossover-hungry fans with the returns of Bruce Banner, Wong, and Emil Blonsky, Werewolf By Night opened up a whole new corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Alongside the titular character, played by Gael García Bernal, the new special presentation introduces Laura Donnelly’s Elsa Bloodstone, the black sheep of a monster-hunting family who is ready to claim her inheritance. While Werewolf By Night’s aesthetic pays tribute to classic horror movies from the ’40s and ’50s, other elements definitely aren’t retro.

“When you see Elsa—I love that character, but when you see her in the comics, it’s really this hypersexualized version of this person with shotguns and all of this,” director Michael Giacchino says in a new interview with Phase Zero. “When we started this project, I was like ‘Kevin [Feige, Marvel Studios president], I don’t want any guns in this, no guns.’ I think we can tell the story without guns, we don’t need them. I certainly don’t want Elsa to be the kind of character that’s just a gun-toting—you know what I mean. I was so against that.”