The longtime screenwriter turned director has been friends with Hardy since the early 2000s; both worked across the street from one another in Southwest London. Marcel was employed at a video rental store, and after hitting it off one day, she started writing scenes for Hardy’s theater. Hardy brought Marcel in to do uncredited rewrites on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Bronson (2008), and she would do the same on George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

In the intervening years, she sold Terra Nova to Amblin and Fox, which would go on to become TV’s most expensive series at the time, and despite creating the concept, she declined to actually run the show. Instead, she went on to co-write Saving Mr. Banks and Fifty Shades of Grey.

In 2017, Hardy asked her to co-write Ruben Fleischer’s Venom (2018), and then became a producing writer on Andy Serkis’ sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage (20221), and now, the writer-director of the trilogy capper, Venom: The Last Dance.

The third chapter in Eddie Brock’s unexpected bromance with symbiote named Venom puts their relationship on center stage, creating existential threat to the people of Earth.

In the middle of Venom: The Last Dance, Marcel puts Eddie Brock in a tuxedo during a stop in Las Vegas. She’d grown weary of Eddie’s Hawaiian shirt and Golden State Warriors t-shirt that was established in the coda of Spider-Man: No Way Home. But she was also motivated by pop cultural factor outside of their fictional universe.

Marcel recently found herself on shortlist of directors for the next James Bond film, alongside with Edward Berger, David Michod, Yann Demange and Bart Layton.

“That’s an extraordinary list to be on. I was flabbergasted,” Marcel says. “There’s never been female Bond director, and when you see something like that, it’s just incredibly humbling. I’m grateful to be mentioned alongside any of those brilliant directors.”