Spoilers follow for Captain America: Brave New World.
After 17 years MIA from the MCU, Liv Tyler is back as Betty Ross in Captain America: Brave New World. Or… is she? While Betty is a major part of the character arc for her father President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford), Tyler’s return is contained to two extremely brief scenes, both of which have some, shall we say, oddities about them. And given Marvel’s history of digital trickery, they certainly could raise some questions about whether Tyler was on set for this movie at all.
Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: Tyler is in the movie. After spending most of the flick wanting to make his estranged daughter Betty proud of him, Thaddeus spontaneously tries calling her from the Oval Office before a critical speech and manages to get her on the phone. And in the movie's final scene, at least before the post-credits scene, Betty visits her father at The Raft, the floating prison where the MCU sends their super-powered criminals.
But the phone call is brief, and the line fuzzy. All of Tyler’s dialogue is confined to one- or two-word answers, to the point that – given Thaddeus is being manipulated by villain Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) – it’s fair to speculate whether President Ross was really talking to his daughter at all. At least according to the movie, he is (the phone call does not turn out to be part of Sterns’s plan), but given the strange placement of the scene, and the nature of the dialogue from Betty, one could venture that this was a vestige of a previous version of the scene, or the movie – or perhaps from a different scene entirely.
Disney, Marvel’s parent company, also has a habit of using Respeecher, a, per the company’s website, “AI-powered speech synthesis software” that can clone a subject’s voice using only “30 minutes of quality recordings.” This tech was previously used on The Mandalorian to craft Young Luke Skywalker’s voice at the end of Season 2, as well as in The Book of Boba Fett. It was also used for Darth Vader’s voice in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and (non-Disney) recently in Academy Award nominees The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, Alien: Romulus, and Better Man. There’s zero evidence that Respeecher was used here, but it is a tool in Disney’s arsenal if they do want to craft a voice for a movie or TV show – and there are certainly more than 30 minutes of quality recordings of Liv Tyler’s voice available.
To cut through any conspiracy theories on this of the type that would make Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) spring into action, a representative for Disney confirmed to IGN that it is indeed Tyler’s voice on the phone call with Ross. So case closed on that! Stand down, Captain America and Falcon.
But how about the scene where she shows up at The Raft? Again, the scene is… odd, to say the least. This may be down to the lighting and camera angles, but the way it’s shot, with Tyler’s Betty emerging from the shadows and only seen through the bars of Thaddeus’s prison, it looks like her head is separated from her body, and her face has the sheen of digital imagery. Granted, Tyler is unearthly beautiful to the point that she was cast as an elf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, so this may just be Liv Tyler being Liv Tyler. But it’s an extremely brief appearance from a hyped character who barely says more than a sentence in the scene.
And it’s perhaps more fair here to speculate that Tyler was not on set at the same time as co-stars Ford and Anthony Mackie (the two other actors in the scene), as Marvel has done this exact thing before. There’s been a lot of reporting about how actors will often film scenes alone on a stage for a Marvel Studios production, and not even be told who they’re acting opposite – most famously for the Illuminati in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. There are reasons for this, including being able to switch cameo characters in and out. But it also leads to infamous out-of-the-movie moments like Elizabeth Olsen noting “I don’t know him” on a lie detector test when asked about working with John Krasinski, who she ostensibly acted opposite in the Doctor Strange sequel.
Except, once again, there’s no conspiracy here, and Mackie should be able to breathe a sigh of relief when his time in the lie detector chair comes around. Again, according to a Disney rep, Tyler was on set, and no body doubles were used. So likely it’s just down to lighting, camera angles, and the brief nature of the scene.
…Which is nice to hear, but still a bit of a bummer for fans of the character – and the actress – particularly because her return was first revealed in 2023, back when the movie was titled Captain America: New World Order.
Director/co-writer Julius Onah addressed her appearance on a recent (February 5) episode of The Official Marvel Podcast, stating, “It was sort of a no-brainer to bring Liv back. She just has this real humanity to her. There's a way this character has a sensitivity that I think people really are drawn to. And it's just a natural quality that Liv has that makes her so incredibly watchable. The relationship she ends up having with Thaddeus Ross, Harrison Ford in this film is a real big part of his journey of trying to cement his legacy and redefine who he has been as a human being and as a leader.”
Certainly, a lot of characters say the name “Betty” to Ford’s Ross throughout the film, and Onah is correct that this is a major facet of his character’s journey. He’s also correct about how audiences respond to Tyler in general. But her role here is a less-than-one-minute-long cameo plus a few lines on the phone, and that’s it, so it’s not really a character that viewers have much of a chance to be “drawn to.”
The other night (February 11) Tyler made a longer appearance on the red carpet at the Captain America: Brave New World premiere than she does in the movie. In an interview with Extra, she discussed her excitement about returning not just to the MCU, but to movie roles at all… The last time she was in a movie was 2019’s Ad Astra (though she did appear in 10 episodes of 9-1-1: Lone Star in 2020).
“Very, very excited, I was very touched,” Tyler said on the return to the MCU. “I got a phone call saying Kevin Feige wants to speak to you, and I said, ‘Well doesn’t he want to see me?’ It’s been a long time… I’ve taken a break from acting for the past few years, and I’ve been home with my children, I have two small, small ones, and a big one. And it was such a lovely way, after COVID and everything, to come back to something so special, the family, and the character. It was sort of a perfect way to lure me back into remembering how much I love acting.”
Tyler continued, explaining how her kids have never seen her in a movie, and she is looking forward to sharing her return as Betty with them.
So was there more to this role at some point? There’s been a lot of ink spilled about reshoots on Brave New World, though recent reports have called them “nothing that was out of the ordinary” for Marvel. And it is par for the course for major blockbusters to rejigger the final cut so that someone who is a major star like Liv Tyler ends up with an extremely minor role in the final film, and sometimes cut out entirely (here’s hoping no Tyler fans sue for this one).
Whatever happened – if this brief bit was the original plan or not – we do still get Betty Ross back after 17 years, and Tyler on screen after five years away. Though maybe a little less than we expected.
