Thor: Love and Thunder, the fourth Thor movie in the MCU, is set to come out this July, with Tessa Thompson on board to reprise her role as Valkyrie, the new King of Asgard.
We know a few things about the movie already (space sharks, anyone?)!, but little about Thompson’s character other than her comment at 2019’s San Diego Comic-Con that her character “needs to find a queen.” In a recent interview, however, Thompson talked about Valkyrie’s powers, which include abilities we haven’t seen from her before.
In a conversation with W Magazine, Thompson shared the following when asked what skills Valkyrie has:
“She has weird skills, to be honest. She can sense when someone is close to death, and she takes them into Valhalla, which is essentially the afterlife. She can revive people. But when she revives people, sometimes she ends up in their body. It’s a weird thing. It can be quite erotic. And then she has superhuman strength and is essentially God.”
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Thompson’s description of Valkyrie’s powerset is intriguing for several reasons. It’s not 100 percent certain that Thompson is talking about her Marvel character or the valkyries of Norse legend, but I’d say it’s 95 percent likely she’s talking about the MCU version of Valkyrie. (In Norse legend, valkyries decide who lives and who dies on the battlefield and also decide if the dead go to Valhalla or Fólkvangr. This bears some similarities to Thomspon’s description, but there are enough differences, and it’s a lot more fun to speculate on what this means for Thor: Love and Thunder.)
If we assume she’s talking about her Marvel character, it seems likely that she’ll be reviving someone in the fourth Thor movie. We know that Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is coming back as Thor and will follow at least part of the Mighty Thor comic run by Jason Aaron, where Jane has cancer and comes closer to death every time she wields Mjolnir.
Does this mean Valkyrie keeps bringing Jane back from the dead, and perhaps at one point embodies her? Or maybe that “erotic” comment Thompson made could mean she’s reviving the new queen? Or MAYBE that means Jane Foster is her new queen?! This is all complete speculation, of course, and the last question is sadly most likely untrue. But it’s fun to think about the possibilities while we wait for Thor: Love and Thunder’s premiere in theaters on July 8, 2022.
