Editor's Note: The following article contains spoilers for Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has started off the MCU’s Phase Five with a bang, bringing back Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang and also properly introducing Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror after his appearance in Loki. But the film also notably introduced a number of other new faces to the MCU, one of them being Katy O’Brian.
O’Brian’s a bit of a sci-fi connoisseur, having appeared in Lucasfilm’s The Mandalorian, and now as Jentorra, one of the Quantum Realm’s Freedom Fighters who appears alongside William Jackson Harper’s Quaz and David Dastmalchian’s Veb in Quantumania. She serves as the no-fuss leader of the Freedom Fighters who doesn’t pull her punches, working to fight Kang the Conqueror’s oppression in the Quantum Realm.
When speaking with Collider’s own Perri Nemiroff, O’Brian revealed that Jentorra’s arc originally focused much more on her history with Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfieffer), who was trapped in the Quantum Realm for years and made allies (and enemies) during her time there. Originally, it was supposed to be more explicit that there was bad blood between the two women from the very moment Jentorra hears Janet’s name: “Primarily because in earlier versions it was heavily alluded to that we’d worked together. I felt very betrayed by her, I felt angry towards her and we kind of side-stepped that and made it more about Jentorra and Cassie once the filming started.”
When asked if the film would’ve changed radically had that bad blood between represented on screen, O’Brian said the film would’ve lent more on a redemption arc for Janet, as opposed to fleshing out her relationship with Cassie and Jentorra teaching her “the difficulty of what it actually means to be a hero”:
“I think that with Janet it would have been more of a Janet redemption arc. With Cassie it’s more of Jentorra accepting this outsider as someone who has helped. So it kind of is less of a redemption arc for Janet in that sense, which I don’t think would have really contributed much to Jentorra’s story, and more of, you know, “Hey, we can actually work together now. You’re someone I didn’t believe in at first. You’re a kid. You’re naive.” But now it’s like, “Alright, I get that your heart is in it for the right reasons and thank you.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is playing in theaters now.