Some of Marvel’s most important superhero stories last only a few minutes.

Before Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff became an Avenger, before Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers could fly through space, and before Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff transformed into the Scarlet Witch, Marvel briefly handed those characters to much younger performers.

Those appearances were small compared with the adult roles. But they carried an unusual responsibility: show audiences the person who existed before the powers, costumes and battles.

For Ever Anderson, Mckenna Grace, London Fuller and Michaela Russell, those trips into Marvel’s past also came with some fascinating stories of their own.

Ever Anderson Had an Unexpected Connection to Action-Movie History

The beginning of Black Widow takes Natasha Romanoff far away from the version audiences knew from the Avengers.

Instead of a highly trained assassin, the movie introduces a blue-haired young Natasha living in suburban Ohio with Yelena, Alexei and Melina. The domestic life appears ordinary, but it is actually part of a Russian undercover operation. When that assignment suddenly ends, Natasha and Yelena are pulled away from what had felt like a real childhood and pushed back toward the Red Room.

Ever Anderson played Young Natasha, while Violet McGraw portrayed Young Yelena. Disney’s official historical archive for the film lists Anderson in the role, and Marvel’s production material describes her Natasha as an older-sister figure who longs for an ordinary life and is deeply protective of Yelena.

Anderson’s casting came with a Hollywood connection that was especially fitting for an action movie.

She is the daughter of Resident Evil star Milla Jovovich and filmmaker Paul W. S. Anderson, the director and writer closely associated with the Resident Evil movie series.

Even more unusually, Black Widow was not the first time Ever had played a younger version of a character tied directly to her mother.

Years earlier, she appeared in 2016’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter as Young Alicia Marcus as well as the Red Queen. The connection is slightly more complicated than simply saying she played a young version of Jovovich’s Alice: Jovovich is credited as both Alice and the elderly Alicia Marcus, while Ever portrays Alicia as a child. The movie ultimately connects Alice to Alicia through its cloning storyline.

That made Ever’s later turn as Young Natasha part of an unusual early-career pattern—stepping into the childhood of formidable women at the center of major action franchises.

She soon moved beyond flashbacks. In 2023, Anderson took the central role of Wendy Darling in Disney’s live-action Peter Pan & Wendy, giving her a much larger adventure after her brief but emotionally important Marvel appearance. Disney itself later highlighted the connection between her Wendy and her earlier portrayal of Natasha.

Captain Marvel Quietly Had Two Young Carol Danvers

Mckenna Grace’s appearance in Captain Marvel works differently.

Carol Danvers’ past is scattered through memories—images of a girl and young woman who falls, crashes and gets knocked down, but repeatedly chooses to stand again. Those fragments eventually become important to understanding the adult Carol’s identity.

Grace was officially credited as Carol at 13 years old. Marvel also featured her at the movie’s 2019 premiere, where she discussed playing the younger version of the future Captain Marvel and the strength she saw in the character.

But there is an easy-to-miss detail in the movie: Grace was not the only child actress playing Carol.

London Fuller portrayed Carol at approximately six years old, while Grace handled the 13-year-old version. The film’s credits distinguish the two roles specifically as “Young Carol (6 Years Old)” and “Young Carol (13 Years Old).”

That means Brie Larson’s Carol is actually built across three distinct ages and three performers.

Grace’s Marvel appearance also arrived during a period when she became especially recognizable for playing younger versions of established characters. Her credits included younger incarnations of Tonya Harding in I, Tonya and Sabrina Spellman in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, among other roles.

Yet her next major franchise would give her something very different: a character she could make her own.

Grace joined Ghostbusters: Afterlife as Phoebe, one of the children at the center of the story and, as the film reveals, a descendant of original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler. Sony described Afterlife as a continuation of the original Ghostbusters universe and listed Grace among its central cast.

She returned as Phoebe in 2024’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, where the Spengler family travels back to the famous New York firehouse and teams up with members of the original Ghostbusters team.

There is a striking progression in those roles.

In Captain Marvel, Grace helped audiences understand who another hero had been. In Ghostbusters, she became one of the young characters responsible for carrying an established franchise forward.

Michaela Russell Didn’t Even Know She Was Auditioning for Wanda

Michaela Russell’s route into Marvel may be the most secretive of all.

Russell appeared as Young Wanda Maximoff in “Previously On,” the eighth episode of WandaVision. The episode sends Wanda through traumatic memories from different stages of her life, including her childhood in Sokovia with her twin brother Pietro and their parents. Russell is credited as Young Wanda in that episode.

But according to Russell, she did not initially know that Wanda Maximoff was the character she was trying to play.

In an interview about the role, Russell recalled receiving seven pages of “dummy sides”—audition material altered to conceal the real project. Her character was called “Sonia,” and her family knew only that the audition was connected to an unnamed Marvel television series.

That secrecy feels especially appropriate for WandaVision, a series built around mysteries, hidden identities and gradual revelations.

Only later did Russell become the childhood face of one of the MCU’s most complicated characters.

Her scene also serves a different purpose from Anderson’s Natasha or Grace and Fuller’s Carol. Young Wanda is not simply there to establish that a superhero was once an ordinary child. Her childhood memories help explain the emotional foundations of the entire series—her family, her love of American sitcoms and the losses that shape the adult Wanda’s attempt to build a perfect world.

Taken together, these young performers reveal something Marvel has repeatedly used to humanize its largest characters.

The superheroes may eventually become assassins, cosmic warriors and reality-altering witches. But before all of that, Marvel often returns them to childhood.

And sometimes the actresses appearing in those brief flashbacks have stories almost as surprising as the heroes they are helping audiences understand.