James Gunn Almost Made One Peacemaker Season 2 Character Shave Their Head
The following article contains spoilers for "Peacemaker" season 2, episode 6.
The actors who work with James Gunn, the writer/director/producer/co-CEO of DC Studios behind hits like "The Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Superman," seem to really like working with him because they keep coming back, with a pretty impressive rotation of "Gunn regulars" who appear in repeat projects. One of those actors is Gunn's real-life wife Jennifer Holland, who has appeared in "Brightburn," "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3," and the HBO Max series "Peacemaker," where she plays rough-and-tumble special forces agent Emilia Harcourt. In season 2 of the series, we see just how badass and broken Harcourt really is when she goes into bars looking for fights just to feel alive, but in a scrapped version of the season, things apparently got even rougher for her — and it would have required Holland to shave her head.
On the episode of the official "Peacemaker" podcast discussing the season 2 episode "Ignorance is Chris," Gunn and Holland revealed that originally Gunn had planned on a storyline that had Harcourt infiltrating the White Dragon's (Robert Patrick) neo-Nazi group by going undercover as a skinhead. That sounds absolutely bonkers and could have easily involved just as many bar fights, but he ended up throwing it out in favor of a storyline about Christopher Smith/Peacemaker (John Cena) wanting to run away to an alternate universe where everything seems better. It still ended up involving Nazis, just in a very different way.
Harcourt would have shaved her head to go undercover
At the end of the first season of "Peacemaker," Chris kills his neo-Nazi supervillain dad in order to both stop his villainy and get a little vengeance for a lifetime of abuse, and Gunn originally intended for season 2 to pick up with Harcourt undercover among his group. In the podcast episode, Holland said that she was going to "have to shave [her] head" for an earlier version and Gunn explained a bit more, saying:
"I wrote a whole season treatment for a completely different version that was about, like, the gang of Nazis that Auggie Smith left in his wake -and just never felt it. [...] I wrote a whole different first episode.It had, like, a really cool action sequence. It has a great action sequence in it that I hope I can use somewhere else. But I think I was just writing around the action sequence."
While there are some truly amazing Harcourt action sequences in the season 2 of "Peacemaker" we ended up with, I'm curious to see if Gunn ends up using the scene for her in another season (or giving it to another character in his greater DC Universe). The idea of the 11th Street Kids taking on neo-Nazis definitely didn't get completely tossed, at least, and we're sure to see some serious Nazi fighting in Earth X in episode 7. It might have been fun to see Harcourt go undercover, but since "Ignorance is Chris" is one of the best things Gunn's ever done, things worked out for the best in the end.