Marvel’s Ironheart Star Had A Major Issue With Her Wardrobe
Dominique Thorne, who portrays Ironheart, had an issue with her suit weighing a staggering 50 lbs.
After the success of 2018’s Black Panther and the subsequent death of its star Chadwick Boseman in 2020, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was at a standstill about what to do with future sequels of the character. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever debuts this weekend with a returning cast and an absence from Boseman, but Marvel has done a fantastic job in casting additional actors in roles made famous by the comic books themselves. One of those characters is Ironheart, played by Dominique Thorne, and the actor recently divulged in an interview with Variety that she had major issues with her wardrobe as the suit for her character weighed more than 50 pounds.
In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Dominique Thorne portrays Riri Williams, an MIT student turned powerful superhero with the alter ego of Ironheart. Noting to Variety how it felt to wear her Ironheart suit for the first time in the sequel, the actor expressed how fun it was to wear a suit high above the air on wires as if she was flying in real life. However, the suit itself weighed 52.5 pounds, exactly half of Thorne’s body weight, which made it a bit difficult to move around in at first.
Dominique Thorne wasn’t sure exactly how much her costume weighed while filming Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and stated that she only found out the exact weight about a month ago when the Disney crew let her in on the information. As her first entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thorne can be seen flying about in the heavy Ironheart suit as if she is the heir to Tony Stark’s image when he famously flew around as the superhero Iron Man in Phases One through Three of the MCU. Thorne is taking on a new life by helping to close out Phase Four of the franchise, which has consisted of several high-profile projects like Thor: Love and Thunder and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever picks up immediately following the death of King T’Challa and begins a new story surrounding the powerful country of Wakanda. Many actors from the first film reprise their roles in the sequel, including Letitia Wright as Shuri, Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, Danai Gurira as Okoye, Winston Duke as M’Baku, and Angela Bassett as Queen Ramonda. Newcomers in addition to Dominque Thorne as Ironheart include Michaela Coel as Aneka and Tenoch Huerta Mejía as anti-hero Namor.
Dominque Thorne playing the character of Ironheart comes at an interesting time for Marvel as new characters are added to every film that Disney produces. Jonathan Majors will see a lot of screen time in the future as Kang the Conqueror, costarring in the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania with franchise stars Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly. Thorne’s entry into the sequel to Black Panther has a lot to live up to compared to the original film, which was highly successful at the box office, grossing over $1.3 billion against a budget of $200 million upon its international release in 2018.
