Gilgamesh Almost Had a Different Role in Early Version of Eternals

One of the characters that the audience ended up loving in Eternals is Kingo's valet Karun (played by Harish Patel). He may not be an Eternal, but he managed to stand out in some of the scenes and became one of the MVPs of the film. But as it turns out, the earlier version of the film didn't have Karun at all and one of the Eternals was supposed to be Kingo's valet.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Eternals co-screenwriters Ryan Firpo and Kaz Firpo revealed that, in an early version of the script, Gilgamesh was supposed to be Kingo's valet. Kaz said, "We have to give huge credit to Patrick Burleigh [the screenwriter who came in after the Firpos] for that. We had a version of them, and Patrick went gangbusters with that. He’s [Karun] another human surrogate you need on the journey. That [character] was someone we played with as the director of all his films. Once upon a time Gilgamesh hung out with Kingo. They were working together. So there was a similar dynamic."

Ryan added, "When we had 12 characters, Gilgamesh was not paired with Thena. He was Kingo’s valet, so he essentially was that character, but as Gilgamesh."

As we all know, in the end, they wrote a human character named Karun who became Kingo's valet while Gilgamesh was paired with Thena. We can pretty much say that the writers made the right decision of changing things up for the characters and the audience ended up loving both Karun and Gilgamesh on their own.

If they went with the early version, we would be deprived of the great chemistry that Kingo and Karun had while Gilgamesh might not have been an integral part of Thena's story arc. It is normal for most MCU films to undergo several rewrites before they head into production and it is impressive to hear whenever we hear stories about our favorite MCU film being vastly different from an earlier version.

The film continues to do very well at the box office despite the mixed reviews from critics and absence in some of the international markets. Marvel hasn't officially announced a sequel yet, but it is likely now given the impressive results so far.

Also Read: An Eternals Documentary May Be Released Says Exec

Eternals is currently showing in theaters.