Florence Pugh says her appearance in Spider-Man: Brand New Day can be traced back to one Tom Holland interview from five years ago.
During a September 28 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Pugh revealed that Holland publicly naming her as the Marvel actor he most wanted to work with helped create early excitement around a Spider-Man and Yelena Belova crossover.
“This all happened because of Tom!” Pugh said.
Tom Holland pitched the pairing back in 2021
The story begins at the Spider-Man: No Way Home premiere in December 2021.
Asked by Entertainment Tonight which newer MCU performer he would like Spider-Man to work with, Holland chose Pugh, who had only recently debuted as Yelena in Black Widow.
“I want to work with Florence Pugh,” Holland said at the time before adding, “I think a really cool Spider-Man/Black Widow movie would be a fun little twist.”
According to Pugh, that answer mattered.
She told Fallon that Yelena was still relatively new compared with Marvel’s more established superheroes, but Holland mentioning her immediately gave fans something to imagine.
“So because of that, fans were then, like, so excited about the idea of it, and that started the ball rolling,” Pugh said. “So, thanks to Tom. Thank you Tom!”
Pugh is describing Holland’s interview as the moment that helped build momentum around the pairing, rather than suggesting he personally made Marvel’s casting decision.
That distinction makes the story more interesting: a casual red-carpet answer eventually became an actual MCU crossover.
Florence Pugh wanted the team-up too
The idea was not one-sided.
When Pugh was asked in 2023 which Marvel character she wanted Yelena to meet, she also picked Spider-Man.
“I think they’d be so silly together. It would be so fun, as well,” she said, adding that she had been “desperate to meet Tom for such a long time.”
Three years later, audiences finally got that interaction in Brand New Day.
Pugh appears briefly as Yelena opposite Holland’s Peter Parker, with the two sharing a comedic sequence set around a Russian bathhouse in New York. Pugh also told Fallon she did a fair amount of improvising while filming the scene.
That comic chemistry is exactly what both actors had imagined years earlier.
Yelena has come a long way since Black Widow
The casting story also shows how dramatically Yelena’s place in the MCU has changed.
When Holland first mentioned Pugh in 2021, she had only just joined Marvel through Black Widow and Hawkeye. Since then, she has become one of the franchise’s more frequently used characters, returning in Thunderbolts before crossing into Peter Parker’s world in Brand New Day.
Pugh is also set to reprise Yelena in Avengers: Doomsday, continuing a run that increasingly places the character alongside Marvel heroes she had little connection to when first introduced.
That makes Holland’s old interview look surprisingly prescient.
A Spider-Man/Yelena pairing sounded like a fun hypothetical in 2021. Five years later, Marvel actually put them together—and Pugh is giving Holland at least some of the credit.
Sometimes, apparently, saying the crossover out loud really can help get the ball rolling.
