Skip to main content

Meet the Incredible Women Behind Captain Marvel


A scene from Captain Marvel with Brie Larson

The Marvel cinematic universe (MCU) is home to some badass female characters. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), Maria Hill (Colbie Smulders)—the list goes on and on. But Captain Marvel, in theaters now, marks the first time an MCU woman has ever been center stage in her own movie. And it's about time.

Set in the 1990s, the film features Academy Award winner Brie Larson as Carol Danvers (known as "Vers" to some), an Air Force pilot who, after an explosion, becomes Captain Marvel and finds herself caught in the middle of an intergalactic war. Not only is she Marvel's first solo female lead in a film; she's also one of the most powerful heroes in the entire universe, full stop.

It follows, then, that the team behind Captain Marvel is made up of some powerful women. Anna Boden directed and wrote Captain Marvel—along with her partner, director and writer Ryan Fleck—and the film boasts several female producers, writers, department heads, and crew members. We spoke with four of the women behind Captain Marvel about their careers, what it was like to work on this groundbreaking Marvel film, and more. Check out our conversations, below.

Courtesy of Pinar Toprak

Pinar Toprak, film composer

Pinar Toprak was born in Istanbul and has been studying music full-time since she was a young girl. “I've always wanted to score film,” she tells Glamour. “I moved to the United States for it, when I was 17 years old. I didn't even know English when I first moved here.”

Determined nonetheless, Toprak gained admission to the Berkeley College of Music and graduated in two years. “I felt like how Carol feels when she arrives to Earth in Captain Marvel," she says. "It was an entirely brand-new experience to try to master, to say the least." After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles, received a master's degree in composition, and landed an internship at the Paramount Pictures music department. In the early aughts, she began working for the legendary Hans Zimmer, who has produced music for The Dark Knight, The Lion King, and other blockbusters.

But even with all her knowledge, Toprak still found she had to keep proving she could write for action and sci-fi as a woman—but she pushed through. “I love comic books, in general, I love fantasy, and I grew up watching Westerns," she says. "But for me, it's not really about the genre. It's about the story.” Now creating music for action and sci-fi projects has become what she's known for: She has credits on Syfy’s Krypton, video games like the massively popular Fortnight, and films like Justice League and, of course, Captain Marvel.

Captain Marvel marks the first time a woman has scored a film for the MCU, and the accomplishment is one Toprak holds closely. “It means everything to me," she says. "It means that my dreams were possible, and my efforts were noticed." Working for Marvel was a huge step for Toprak, and she was relieved to find the creative executives at the company, as well as her Captain Marvel team, were receptive to all she had to offer. “They've been really wonderful with being open to ideas, because I heard a very high-risk score from the start," she says.

The "high-risk" score Toprak had in mind was a mix of musical homages and throwbacks one might not expect to hear in a movie debuting in 2019. She wanted to match the energy and feel of the scores accompanying the action films in theaters during the events of Captain Marvel—nineties classics like Bad Boys and Heat. “Even when I brought that idea, the idea of having the homage to the nineties action films, they were just game for trying anything," she explains. "Of course, Marvel is a well-oiled machine, so they like things done in a certain way, but I had a pretty large playground to play in. It was wonderful.”


Using the nineties-tinged soundtrack that accompanies the movie, Toprak was able to perfectly compose a score that fed Captain Marvel’s unique atmosphere. Creating the music for a film like this was a “dream project,” she says, adding, “I learned so much throughout this process. I feel like once it's actually out, and I can talk about it to everyone, the impact of it is going to hit me more. It's just been the most incredible experience of my life. I'm honored.”

Getty Images

Debbie Berman, editor

Debbie Berman didn't stumble upon Captain Marvel: She advocated to be a part of the project. The editor enjoyed working on 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming so much she knew she wanted to work with Marvel again. So “I made it very clear that I was interested in working on both Black Panther and Captain Marvel,” she says. Ultimately, she landed editing gigs for both movies. “I was relentless in my passion and persistence pursuing Spidey," Berman says. "I was lucky that, at some point, I think they decided it was easier to give me a shot than to have to keep listening to me arguing to get on the film.”

Berman's passion for film editing started in high school, where she often skipped classes in favor of working on short films. By the time she graduated, Berman had “hours and hours” of films she’d edited together. She discovered her talent early on and used her skills to break into the film industry in her native South Africa. “The reality of being a woman and in South Africa without money or connections meant the best way to have a reasonable chance of actually getting in the industry was through editing," Berman says. "In earlier phases of one’s career, sometimes just knowing how to use the equipment can get you in the door.”

But even with the expertise Berman has, “every film is different.” So her relationship with her directors is always important, as it was on Captain Marvel. “The director and editor relationship is a very special and intense one," she says. "It’s basically two people holed up in a dark room day and night for months on end, taking hundreds of hours of footage and trying to craft the best story and performances together to create an engaging film. You are their loudest cheerleader, their therapist, their first lieutenant, their first audience member, and their first second opinion.”

Captain Marvel was a unique challenge for Berman because she worked with two directors, Boden and Fleck. “With a team that has codirectors, that dynamic shifts," she says. "The codirector is now the first second opinion. As the ‘third wheel,’ you often get to be the tie-breaker if the directors disagree with each other.” But the challenge also came with the bonus of working with Boden. “It’s fantastic having a female director," Berman says. "In fact, it's fantastic to be on the set of a film with so many female crew members. Sometimes we would be in the bathroom and giggle because all the stalls were full. Like, ‘We need more ladies' rooms on this floor now, Marvel!’ It was a wonderful feeling.”

Berman's success as a film editor is incredible, but there's still a large disparity between women and men working behind the camera. She notes that out of the 250 top-grossing films in 2017, just 16 percent were edited by women. “It’s not because of the lack of available women, lack of trying, or lack of talent," she says.

This discouraging stat is one reason she was pleased to work on Captain Marvel. “I felt it was crucial to have a female perspective helping carve the characters and the story for Marvel Studio’s first female-led film,” she tells Glamour. “I love collaborating with other women, not so much because I find the creative experience different—I think that is more variant dependent upon personality—but because I know they have faced similar battles that I fought. They have gone through hell and high water to be standing where they are. So there is a sisterhood in arms, in a sense. It’s like, 'I see you. I know what you did to get here. I am going to do everything in my power to push you even further forward.' Working on a film like Captain Marvel is personal."

Courtesy of Sanja Milkovic Hays

Sanja Milkovic Hays, costume designer

Sanja Milkovic Hays was destined to be Captain Marvel's costume designer. Her out-of-the-box thinking helped her meet all the demands of the job, from crafting Captain Marvel's superhero costume to creating Carol Danvers' casual nineties looks. Interestingly, she says her background in architecture especially informed her process on this movie. "It was so helpful when it came to thinking about how the actors were going to move in these complicated costumes,” Milkovic Hays tells Glamour.

After finishing her architecture degree at the University of Zagreb in her home country of Croatia, Milkovic Hays made the move to costumes. She started her career with Jadran Studios, also in Croatia, before moving to Los Angeles in 1987 to find work as an assistant costume designer. The movies she fought to work on reflected many of her own interests. She “saw everything” that came out but was drawn toward one specific genre: sci-fi and fantasy. It didn't take long for her to start racking up credits in that space.

Costume-wise, Captain Marvel is the perfect hybrid of sci-fi/fantasy and nineties reality. “It is a bit of a period piece,” she explains. With her work on films like The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (which is set in the 1940s), this wasn’t totally new ground for the designer. The biggest challenge, though, came from working on Carol’s Kree uniform, which starts as green and black before turning red, blue, and yellow. Hays wanted Carol’s suit to do the comics justice, but Larson had to be able to move too. “Working with stiffer material and fabricating [a costume like Carol’s] was not all new to me, but it was still a challenge,” Milkovic Hays explains. “With all the proportions and lines to make movement easy—but also to look good on camera—it was helpful to be from that world of architecture. In the same way one accounts for building stability, but also subtle movements, I needed to for Carol.”

Captain Marvel isn’t Milkovic Hays' first Marvel film. In 1998 she did the costumes for Wesley Snipes’ vampire superhero in Blade, Marvel's first movie to center on a black character. Once Marvel officially became Marvel Studios—and launched the MCU—she knew she wanted to work on another groundbreaking project. She says working on Captain Marvel was "a dream come true.”

Getty Images

Geneva Robertson-Dworet, writer

Geneva Robertson-Dworet loves tearing down stereotypes. “I always wanted to write sci-fi and action,” she says. When the Captain Marvel screenwriter arrived on the Hollywood scene, though, sci-fi and action weren’t exactly considered a woman's forte. So Robertson-Dworet used that to her advantage. “I thought it was actually really helpful as a woman to be doing something that was considered a little out of the norm for women," she says. "It can actually be beneficial sometimes to create a niche for yourself, even if you then find yourself confronting gender stereotypes.”

Her determination paid off. In 2018 she received her first big-screen credit for rewriting the script for Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider reboot. Now she joins her business partner, screenwriter Nicole Perlman (Guardians of the Galaxy), in being one of the few women with a writing credit on a Marvel film. This is all the more impressive when you realize that Captain Marvel is just her second feature credit.

“I was incredibly honored,” Robertson-Dworet says of working on the project. “I grew up on action movies. That's what I write, that's what I love. And there are not that many fantastic ones with women.”


Captain Marvel's directors, Boden and Fleck, are best known for smaller, more story-driven indie films, which was one of the things that attracted Robertson-Dworet to the project in the first place. “I had been a fan of [Boden and Fleck] for so long," she says. "Never in my wildest dreams [did I think], Oh yeah, I'll get to write a movie with them. For me, that was a dream come true, because they make such poignant, funny movies.”

It helped that Robertson-Dworet was already a fan of the Captain Marvel comics by Kelly Sue DeConnick. Even still, writing a film that honored the franchise and the fandom surrounding it was a challenge. “Obviously I've read all of Kelly Sue's books, and I'm familiar with Captain Marvel comics, but even if I found something I didn’t know or I had a question, Marvel put so many experts at our fingertips," Robertson-Dworet says. "People who know their universe inside and out, like Jonathan Schwartz, our producer, who knows every comic with his magical brain. They were almost always in the room with you or an instant call away."

The experience working with the Captain Marvel creative team was “wonderfully collaborative,” Robertson-Dworetsays. “They were totally on board to make Captain Marvel as a weird movie that was going to be a little different from other superhero movies. It doesn't feel like a machine when you're in it. Marvel was incredibly generous with letting us play around and figure out the doorway that would be best for Carol Danvers and be the most inspiring story with her.”

Robertson-Dworet hopes to continue making films like Captain Marvel and helping other female writers do the same. She recently formed a production company with writers Lindsey Beer and Nicole Perlman, Known Universe, in an effort to green-light more compelling stories about women. “We just signed onto a female-driven Fast and Furious spin-off, so we're very excited about that and other things coming down the hatch,” she says. “We're incredibly excited to find more great female voices to promote and more great female character stories to tell.”

Kendra James is a writer in Los Angeles whose work can be found in Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Marie Claire, and at The Toast, espnW, The Daily Beast, and more. Follow her on all things social @KendraJames_.