Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 is a movie that features a pretty spectacular main cast, but if you take a closer look at other characters you’ll notice that director and screenwriter James Gunn was thorough even when casting smaller roles. In an interview with Collider, franchise star Daniela Melchior (Fast X) revealed that the character she plays in the Marvel movie was written specifically for her by Gunn.

In the movie, Melchior plays Ura, the only professional that stands in the way of Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), and Nebula (Karen Gillan) being able to retrieve a file that was hidden in the depths of a place called Orgocorp. Even though she’s a secretary of sorts, Ura ends up standing out to the viewer because she challenges the type of behavior we expect from this type of character. While talking to Perri Nemiroff, Melchior revealed that the role was tailor-made for her:
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“[James Gunn] sent me a message saying that someone from his team or something would approach my team because he wrote a character for me, so there wasn’t a discussion about other roles because it was that one. And he told me ‘it’s a sequence that you’ll be kidnapped by Gamora and Quill, and you’ll fight’ or something, and I was thinking physical fight, but no. Then I realized it would be more verbal, and I was very excited.”

Image via Marvel Studios

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Melchior and Gunn: Trust First And Foremost
Melchior continues on and reveals that she didn’t even see a script, and her preparation to get into Ura’s shoes was basically having some idea of the character’s profession and where she works. Initially, the actor wasn’t planning on making Ura very alien-like, but things changed once she arrived on set and took a look around:

“When I got there on set, I wasn’t planning on doing a weird creature at all with weird reactions and everything, but once I saw everyone with all the prosthetics and everything, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what makes sense.’”

Of course, this kind of trust between actors, directors, and screenwriters can only happen when they know and trust each other well enough to say yes to a project without even needing to look at a script. Melchior worked with Gunn on The Suicide Squad (which he also directed and wrote), and the new head of DC Studios clearly liked what she did with her character Ratcatcher II.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is being perceived as a breath of fresh air from Marvel Studios, not only because of its story but also because it brought Marvel fans back to movie theaters: It grossed $780 million so far, a turnout that’s close to what the other entries made at the box office.

You can watch our full interview with Daniela Melchior below: