An actress previously involved with 2016’s Doctor Strange spoke about her removed death scene in the Infinity Saga film.
Previously, concept artist Darrell Warner revealed on Instagram that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness once included a sequence where the story revisited the night when the titular hero lost his sister, Donna, to hypothermia.
This would’ve been part of the version of the sequel that included Nightmare as the key antagonist and not Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch.
Strange’s tragic past was once originally part of his debut origin film as well.
The Death of Doctor Strange’s Sister
In an interview with ComicBook.com, actress Lulu Wilson talked about her scene in 2016’s Doctor Strange that was filmed, but never made it into the final film.
The kicker? Her character, Donna Strange, aka the late sister of Stephen Strange, “died:”
“I died and that’s the whole thing because Donna Strange is dead and Doctor Strange is like, ‘My sister is dead!’ So I died and remember being a little bit pissed because come on, that would have been a good moment and would have been good for me.”
If offered the chance, the actress admitted that “of course” she would come back as Donna if ever offered the chance:
“Yes, of course! Who wouldn’t be? On that one, I was in fifth grade and was really, really young. It was just a couple of days of me on set and I’m not going to say what I did.”
Back in 2016, the original film’s director Scott Derrickson talked about the deleted scene, making note that her death “was probably instrumental in him becoming a doctor:”
“We shot a scene… you know, in the comics, if you know the comics well, Strange has a backstory where his sister died when he was young, and that she drowned. That had a real significant effect, and was probably instrumental in him becoming a doctor.”
While the scene was “shot,” and he “loved” it, at the end of the day Derrickson felt like “it just didn’t fit in the movie:”
“… And we shot that scene, and I loved that scene. It was a really great scene. It just didn’t fit in the movie. It felt like… it just didn’t work. But the self-contained scene by itself, I thought it was great. And Lulu [Wilson], who was the little girl in Ouija and was in Deliver Us From Evil, played the girl. So I hope that scene’s on the DVD.”
With how significant the loss of Donna Strange was to Stephen’s journey as a person, one would think it’d get a bigger focus at this point.
Instead, the most mention it’s gotten was a brief line in Multiverse of Madness while Stephen was speaking to a crazed Variant of himself.
With how the sequel ended, it’s clear that Marvel Studios is cooking up more plans with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sorcerer. At the very least, this will include Charlize Theron’s mysterious Clea, who made her first appearance in the film’s post-credits tag.
With a time-traveling villain terrorizing the Marvel Cinematic Universe, could there still be a good chance of seeing Strange revisit the night Donna died? With how it came up in the development of the first two films, it’s clearly something on Marvel’s mind.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is now streaming on Disney+.
