In 2021, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ Valentina Allegra de Fontaine hit the Marvel Cinematic scene, first appearing in the franchise second Disney+ subscription-exclusive series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and then cameoing in Black Widow, the 24th of the Marvel movies in order, a few months later. Then the character returned in late 2022 for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and she’ll finally return next May for Thunderbolts*. So by now, Louis-Dreyfus knows her way around handling Marvel spoilers, so maybe Tom Holland, Mark Ruffalo, two of the franchise’s most notoriously loose-lipped actors (among others), should take a note from her on the matter.
While discussing what to expect from Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in the upcoming Marvel movie, which included sharing how we’ll see “her entire plan unfold” and describing the character as an “anti-villain,” Louis-Dreyfus informed EW that she hasn’t shared any Thunderbolts* spoilers with anyone, including her two sons, who she described as “Marvel fanatics.” As she explained:
People have been trying to pull [spoilers] out of me, and I just live in fear that I'm going to say something that I shouldn't. I've never been involved with a project like this where so much is kept under wraps. It's like working for the CIA of show business. I am so terrified that I'm going to fuck up unwittingly. But so far I haven't.
This is definitely how someone who’s working on a Marvel production should handle spoilers: assume you might accidentally say something, and then put in extra effort to make sure you don’t do that. While Mark Ruffalo and Tom Holland obviously don’t go around deliberate spoiling key Marvel plot points left and right, there have certainly been times when the Hulk and Spider-Man actors could have benefited from exercising the same kind of restraint Julia Louis-Dreyfus is talking about. As just two examples, Ruffalo spoiled the end of Avengers: Infinity War nearly a year ahead of its release, and Holland spoiled that same movie to a packed theater before it’d even started playing.
Tom Holland once claimed that Mark Ruffalo was worse about spoilers than he was, and frankly, I’ll give him. After all, along with the standard variety of spoilers, Ruffalo also accidentally live-streamed the beginning of Thor: Ragnarok during the world premiere. Regardless, Julia Louis-Dreyfus clearly has the art of Marvel secret-keeping down to a fine art and science. Now she just has to keep her streak going for roughly half a year until Thunderbolts* is released… though that’s not to say that will be the last we see of her in the MCU.
Thunderbolts* hits theaters on May 2, 2025, and Louis-Dreyfus’ costars include Sebastian Stan, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell, Hannah John-Kamen, Olga Kurylenko and Lewis Pullman. Jake Schreier directed the feature, and Eric Pearson, Lee Sung Jin and Joanna Calo all worked on the script.
