How ‘Ironheart’ Cooked Up That White Castle Fight Scene

Marvel Television’s Ironheart is packed with epic action sequences. But one of the most memorable sequences takes place in an unconventional location: a White Castle.

In Episode 5, “Karma’s a Glitch,” brilliant engineer Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) meets up with her witchy friend Zelma Stanton (Regan Aliyah) to discuss their plans over White Castle burgers. She’s followed to the fast food restaurant by members of her former crew — Jeri (Zoe Terakes), Roz (Shakira Barrera), and Clown (Sonia Denis) — who confront her and try to kill her. Stranded without her high-tech iron suit, Riri has to use her brain to survive, flipping over tables, flinging cutlery, and using baking trays as a shield.

The stakes are dire for Riri, but showrunner Chinaka Hodge tells Marvel.com that she still wanted to infuse the White Castle scene with a sense of playfulness.

“That’s the joy of reading comic books,” the writer explains. “I had Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and Hungry Hungry Hippos as a kid, and there’s a little bit of that in [that fight].”

Ironheart shot the sequence in Atlanta, but there was one major problem: There are no real White Castle locations in the city. So, production designer Andrew Menzies had to build a new White Castle from the ground up. Director Angela Barnes sketched out a rough blueprint on poster board, and Menzies brought that to life, modeling the series’ fake restaurant on a real-life location in Chicago (Riri’s hometown).

“The show [has] a very fanciful concept of iron suits flying around,” Menzies explains. “So, I really leaned into trying to ground the sets as much as possible in reality. It makes those fanciful scenes more real.”

That quest for reality meant that the crew had to carefully craft every detail in the fake restaurant — from the flickering neon signs in the windows to the perfect dusting of fake dirt. “There’s always the layering of grime,” Menzies says. “Even if a place is spotless, there’s always grime in the corners or on the tiles, or in the little peeling of the wallpaper.”

That being said, Menzies and his team might have been a little too good at their jobs. Once the White Castle signs were installed on the exterior of the building, word quickly spread around Atlanta. Before long, local residents began stopping by to try and place an order.

“It was on the Atlanta news for the longest time!” Thorne says.

“Sometimes we’d get people trying to come in and order hamburgers on the set,” Barnes remembers. “One time we literally had a rapper trying to shoot a music video [there], and we were like, ‘No, this is our set to shoot our stuff on. It’s not a real White Castle!””

“We even had one of the city council people try and shut it down because it wasn’t to code!” Menzies says with a laugh. “We were shut down for a day by a person saying, ‘Hey, the bathrooms aren’t up to code.’ That was a good sign of how real it was: They believed it was the real thing.”

One of the other biggest challenges was building a space that could accommodate the scene’s complicated fight choreography. Barnes and Menzies worked closely with stunt coordinator Danny Hernandez to design a floorplan that had lots of space. “You’ll notice that it’s quite open,” Menzies explains. “Often, White Castles in reality are quite closed off, and the kitchens are separate. But we really kept it open so they could jump over counters, smash into counters, and hide under tables.”

The location also allowed Hernandez to get creative with choreography. After all, he points out, Riri is known for her brains over her brawn, especially when she doesn’t have access to her iron suit.

“We really wanted to design this fun sequence utilizing [Riri’s] talents,” explains the stunt coordinator, who’s worked on previous Marvel projects like Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame. “She’s always one step ahead. She’s always thinking on the move, and she takes advantage of her size and stature. We were thinking, ‘Okay, what’s inside a White Castle? How do they make their burgers, and what tools can we use?’ They have fridges, they have oil, and they have spatulas, buns, ketchup, and stuff like that.”

“Her strength is her brain,” adds Barnes, who directed the final three episodes of Ironheart. “We approached it kind of like MacGyver. How does she make what’s around her work?”

Hernandez particularly praises Thorne for her dedication to learning every fight move. The actress is no stranger to stunts, having made her debut in 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But headlining a massive series like Ironheart required an even bigger physical commitment.  

“She’s game, Dominique,” Hernandez says of the series’ star. “She was training with us for months and months, jumping and flying and getting on the wires and showing off some martial skills. She really worked tremendously hard.”

The action later moves from the inside of the restaurant to the outside, as a newly powered-up Zeke Stane (Alden Ehrenreich) confronts Riri. He sends her crashing into an exterior sign and letters go flying, rearranging themselves to read, “OUCH.” It’s one of Barnes’ favorite details in the series, and she notes that the original sign says, in part, “GO WOLFPACK,” a reference to a real-life Chicago-area youth football team.

But again, that commitment to realism caused some problems. Ehrenreich remembers one late night shoot, when someone decided to reward the crew by sending an actual White Castle food truck to set, handing out free food. Before long, the smell of burgers attracted a crowd.

“We were shooting in the middle of the night, so all these drunk people came out of these clubs and bars and went up to this White Castle, like, ‘I want to get White Castle,’” Ehrenreich recalls. “[The crew] was like, ‘No, no, no, this isn’t a real White Castle,’ but they were holding White Castle burgers! So for the drunk people, it must have been pretty disorienting and confusing.”

And although Ironheart’s fake White Castle is no longer standing, the cast and crew say its legacy will endure.

“It was a parking lot, and then it was a White Castle, and then it was a parking lot again,” Barnes says with a laugh. “We built a White Castle but not a functional one. It had no running water or all that kind of stuff. But when you walked in, it felt like a White Castle. That movie magic was real.”

Marvel Television’s Ironheart is streaming now, only on Disney+.