Avengers Endgame: Jane Foster explained – did Natalie Portman RETURN to film new scene?

WARNING: Spoilers follow for Avengers: Endgame.

Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster was seen in the new Marvel film, but very briefly.

Her character was seen from afar, and then very fleetingly in close-up when she was being pursued by Rocket.

She ended up being vital to the plot: the Avengers went back in time to retrieve the Infinity Stones, and Jane had very up-close encounters with the Reality Stone in Thor: The Dark World when she came into contact with the Aether.

But because she was seen so briefly, fans had been wondering if Portman recorded brand new footage, or if the Russo brothers were using offcuts from Thor: The Dark World.

The answer is somewhere in the middle.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, they said that while it IS unused footage from The Dark World that is shown on-screen, Portman did provide some voiceover.

Anthony said: “All she did new for this movie was —”

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“The voice,” Joe interjected.

“A little bit of voice-over when she’s talking in the distance, that’s it,” Anthony added.

All Jane says is a quick thanks to the Asgardians who had been taking care of her.

In a separate interview, screenwriters Steven McFeely and Christopher Markus explained that they had initially planned for Jane to have far more to do.

In original drafts and outlines, they were reluctant to revisit 2012’s The Avengers – which allowed for more room for Thor and Jane to interact.

“In the first draft, we didn’t go back to the [original] Avengers movie,” McFeely told the New York Times. “We went back to Asgard.

“But there’s a moment in the MCU, if you’re paying very close attention, where the Aether is there and the Tesseract is in the vault.

“In that iteration, we were interested in Tony going to Asgard. He had a stealth suit, so he was invisible, and he fought Heimdall, who could see him.”

Markus added: “Thor had long scenes with Natalie Portman. And Morag [where Peter Quill finds the Orb] was hugely complicated.”

In the end, Heimdall did not return at all, and the Tesseract was retrieved from New York along with the Mind Stone and the Time Stone in 2012.

The writers also opened up on one of the movie’s heartbreaking deaths, explaining how the scene in question nearly ended very differently.

Avengers: Endgame is out now.