'Captain America: Brave New World' Producer Nate Moore Clarifies Sabra Situation
This goes far beyond October 7, 2023…because the casting predates it but there was still full awareness of the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict
Marvel Studios was in quite a pickle when it was revealed that they had cast Emmy-nominated Unorthodox actress Shira Haas as Ruth Bat-Seraph, also known as Israeli superhero and Mossad agent Sabra, in the film that would become known as Captain America: Brave New World. Israel’s escalation into genocide against the Palestinians following the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 made the controversy even stronger, as shown by reignited backlash after the release of the July 2024 trailer. The company had long assured the concerned Palestinians that the character would be reworked, and now a week before release, producer Nate Moore is detailing just how they did it.
“She’s Israeli, but she’s not Mossad. Now she works in the U.S. government,” Moore said, quashing speculation that her Israeli background was removed, which garnered its own backlash from Israelis. “What we thought was interesting was a lot of the characters in the film revolve around President Thaddeus Ross [Harrison Ford],” he continued. “Ruth works within the government under Ross, so her perspective on that character and Sam’s perspective sort of put them on a collision course. She’s first-generation Israeli, but she works within the U.S. government.”
Moore insists that the reworking wasn’t about the backlash, and more about the adaptation process and tying her to elements of the MCU world. Thus Sabra is not a Mossad agent but a former Black Widow who trained in the Red Room. “We try to take the essence of a character but reinterpret it in a way that we find interesting. When we made the Black Widow movie, we realized there was an opportunity to connect that mythology to characters that we thought were interesting and maybe didn’t want to translate as one-to-one from publishing…The Ruth Bat-Seraph you meet in the film has very much, I would argue, the attitude of the character from publishing, but the backstory is different.”
The tie to current mythology also means that, without the exploration having begun for mutants in the Sacred Timeline, though Adamantium will have been discovered in the film, it means that Ruth can’t have her mutant powers like superhuman strength and speed (yet) either. “She’s no longer a mutant. She’s a part of the red room [from Black Widow],” Moore explained. “You want to make the best version of a character – be honest to the roots of the character without not necessarily doing what publishing did. We weren’t about to put her in a feather boa and have her throw diamond earrings at people [such as in the comic books] but we did like the attitude of the character.”
Sabra first appeared in The Incredible Hulk comics in the early 1980s bringing the stories into the Israeli-Palestine conflict. A 1981 Hulk comic had Hulk teach Sabra human values after she coldly kills a Palestinian boy with little remorse. The name Sabra is a modern Hebrew term for a person born in Israel and the name of the refugee camp in Lebanon that was the site of a tragic 1982 incident where between 800 and 3,500 Palestinians were killed. Captain America: Brave New World opens in theaters on Friday, February 14.
Source: The National via Variety