What Excited Emily VanCamp About Playing Sharon Carter Again

Emily VanCamp excited a lot of fans when she showed up in last Friday's The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode, "The Power Broker," as Sharon Carter. For anyone who wondered what Peggy Carter's great-niece had been doing since she was last seen in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, questions were answered. It turns out that, as a non-Avenger, Sharon didn't get the pardon that they did for her actions back in the day, and she's been a fugitive ever since. That means, fortunately, that she's around to help Bucky (Sebastian Stan) and Sam (Anthony Mackle), plus their new ally Baron Helmut Zemo (Daniel Brühl) when they get into trouble and need a place to lay low.

Sharon has changed since fans saw her last. She's become disillusioned as a result of her experiences, and she has stripped herself of the loyalty and integrity she was known for, to embrace the criminal lifestyle that's widespread in Marvel's hive of scum and villainy, Madripoor. She's living it up as a black market arts dealer in a nice penthouse, having clearly shed her do-gooder S.H.I.E.L.D. agent persona. 

The episode, indeed, showed a new side of Sharon. She gets to kick a little — well, a lot of — butt in the episode, covering Sam and Bucky as they go search for Dr. Wilfred Nagel with the promise of getting her name cleared. VanCamp, who wanted to be a dancer as a child and has plenty of fight choreography experience due to her role on Revenge, according to Women's Health magazine, is seeing more action in the Disney+ series than she ever did in the movies. And for VanCamp, who told Variety, "Marvel, when they call, you always answer," it was all this fighting that excited her about returning to the role.

VanCamp spoke to Variety about her new scenes, saying that quickly she realized that her action sequences were going to be pretty epic. "It was talked about while the scripts were being written, like, 'Well, you're gonna have to do fight training. We've got some sequences for you that are going to be a little harder than maybe you've done before.' That always excites me. And the training was definitely much more intense than it's ever been," she said.

She praised the stunt team for doing a great job of preparing the actors for those moments, and calls her scene at the train yard, "a crazy Sharon fight sequence. She's kind of on her own," VanCamp said. "It was just really fun to tackle that. In that version of what we were doing, you can't really hide behind weapons or superpowers. It's just really gritty fighting, and so that was that was super cool to learn all these new techniques and kick some butt."

Additionally, she had to train as much as possible, using a stunt stage in Atlanta whenever she had a spare moment from shooting The Falcon and the Winter Soldier or her current project, The Resident. Otherwise, she felt, she really wouldn't be able to cut it in those scenes. "We went through several different versions of how she fights now versus who she was as an agent," she explained about her character's changes. "It's fun to figure out how to give her that raw edge, but also show that she's a trained fighter. There's a mix of scrappy street fighting with her technical background."

Bucky and Sam take their leave of Sharon in the episode after asking her to come back to the U.S. with them, but what's coming for her character isn't clear. Some fans have theorized that she might be the elusive Power Broker, for instance. VanCamp couldn't say anything, of course, but said she's seen future scripts, which implies she's returning. And VanCamp thinks Sharon's main goal is to be pardoned, despite a temptation to lash out at her former allies for receiving the perks she never got. The actress says that this new relationship between the three is an "interesting dynamic" to see.

"She's been on the run. Enough is enough. She's sacrificed enough. And — if I'm talking about reading the scripts in sequence — that's her main goal, and rightfully so. She comes from this bloodline of agents and has this tremendous love for her life that she had, and now she's stuck in this sort of pirate land, and doing things that she's probably not really wanted to do," VanCamp told Variety. "So I think that's her main goal, to get back to some semblance of the life that she had, if that's even possible. I mean, that was my biggest take. This is her ticket."

The Disney+ series only has three episodes left to go, so it's going to have to start giving fans some closure, right? Viewers aren't sure what's going to happen yet, and despite the theories flying around, actress Erin Kellyman — who plays Karli Morgenthau — told SyFy yesterday that none of the speculation is hitting the mark. "I actually don't think I've seen anybody close yet," she said. "There's a lot of guessing, but I don't think anybody's got it just right yet." So it looks like we'll just have to see what happens next.