America Chavez actor Xochitl Gomez recently offered up some details on the original opening scene that was shot for Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. This is one of the scenes that involved big reshoots for the film and the way the scene was changed also changed the trajectory of her character’s journey in the story.
While talking to /Film, she explained: “[The reshoots] changed lots of things. The main thing about Marvel is that they do test screenings so that they can get the movie to be what fans want, make them be what Marvel movies are. We did lots of changes for that reshoot, it was pretty insane.”
In the opening of the film that we saw, Defender Strange, who was one of the multiverse versions of Doctor Strange, attempts to sacrifice America’s life rather than save it to protect the power that she harnesses and keep it out of the hands of Scarlet Witch. Because of this betrayal, America has a hard time trusting Benedict Cumberbatch’s Earth-616 version of Doctor Strange. In the original opening scene, Defender Strange would have actually saved her and not betrayed her.
The actress shares: “Defender Strange was actually saving me at the beginning and it was a turning point, that when he died it was me being heartbroken over the fact that someone who cared and was protecting me had passed away. Then, when we did reshoots it was this main drastic change that Defender Strange was actually betraying me and trying to take my power away from me.”
This change definitely gave America and Strange a more interesting dynamic and more depth. There was a whole trust issue thing that America had to work through over the course of the film. Then there’s Strange who had to realize that he had to put his trust in another person in order to save the world.