What did new cast members Rourke and Scarlett Johansson bring to the Iron Man film mythos?
Well, Scarlett [as the Black Widow] not only works us towards the Avengers but also changed the dynamic between Robert and Gwyneth [Paltrow, who plays Pepper]. One of the other traps you don’t want to fall into is just repeating the same dynamics and turning it into “Hart to Hart.” You don’t want it to be “Moonlighting.” You don’t want to have the same thing over and over again. It’s not a television series. It’s a movie so you have to change things and you have to create a beginning, middle and an end so that it doesn’t just feel like an episode in a series of films. With Mickey, I didn’t want to just have two guys in robot suits hitting each other again. I wanted to have a different type of villain that used the same technology, existed within the same framework and rules of our world, but that was going to present not just a challenge physically but also in how dark he was; how he’s related to and how his fate and Tony’s fate are connected. “Iron Man” was so widely accepted by fans
