Back in August of 2010 while Mary was promoting Scott Pilgrim Vs the World during one of her interviews during Comic-Con, Mary (& I think a few of the other actors too) had revealed that they had all received a list of ten facts about their character that wasn’t in the books or the film.
At the time, Mary explained:
It was just a lot about her childhood and her relationships that aren’t talked about in the books and the movie that kind of shaped who she is. And it made me understand what a sort of sad character she is at the core and not so much bad-ass and mysterious and cool so much as just guarded because she’s been through a lot of…you know.
A fan recently asked comic creator Bryan Lee O’Malley about the lists, and this was the Q&A:
Q. I heard somewhere that you told Mary Elizabeth Winstead something about Ramona that nobody else knows while filming the movie. Care to share?
A. During the movie, i was asked to write down some information on each character, like a bio, and these were subsequently turned into “10 facts about your character” for the actor. (According to Anna Kendrick, we forgot to do one for Stacey… oops.) Most of the facts were just stuff from the books that never made it into the movie, and since this was happening before volume 6 was written, some of the facts were ‘previously unreleased’ (like, guess what Mark Webber learned about Stephen Stills).
I just tracked down the 10 facts about Ramona. I mean, these were mostly thematic things, just character motivation stuff for the actor to have in their brain. Like for Ramona one of the facts was this: “The whole ‘new new girlfriend’ thing is more apt than Scott realizes. ‘New new’ is exactly what Ramona is always trying to become, but the novelty keeps wearing off, forcing more changes in her life.”
The big one that obviously came out in an interview at some point was the idea that Ramona had a younger brother who died. It’s not important how or why, but it was important to me that the great tragedy of Ramona’s life was NOT about Scott, Gideon, or another romance. It was her own thing, it was private.
Anyway, ultimately it just felt too heavy for the book, and I never wrote it in officially. It was just between me and Mary. Now you know.