Last year’s Kingsman: The Secret Service was 99% of a good movie, which featured Colin Firth in a second-act makeover role as a suave English spy and action hero. The movie was successful enough to justify a sequel which is slated to shoot later this summer, but since Firth and original villain Samuel L. Jackson won’t be returning, director Matthew Vaughn has to put together a semi-new cast for the second outing. And he’s starting with Julianne Moore, who The Hollywood Reporter says is in talks to the play the new villain, and that the action will move from the UK to the US.
Moore was GREAT as President Coin in The Hunger Games, so a villain role is totally in her wheelhouse, and it’s also adding to a wave of new female villains in blockbusters. Cate Blanchett is going to be the big bad in Thor: Ragnarok, and Charlize Theron—besides being the evil queen in The Huntsman: WHO IS THIS FOR?—might be the next bonkers baddie in the Fast/Furious franchise. This is a rising trend, and I think we’ll see more villainesses as producers start diversifying projects as fast as they can, since they’re just now arriving in 2012 when everyone really started clamoring for more female roles in blockbusters.
Kingsman stands out, though, because it will be R, and in keeping with the spirit of the first movie, the sequel will probably be just as bloody, which means not only having Moore play a classy ginger villainess, but that she might be involved in graphically violent action scenes as well, and maybe even get in a cool death scene. Movies remain unwilling, by and large, to do on-screen violence to female characters—this supercut of “100 Movies, 100 Headshots” features only two scenes with female characters. Kingsman is exactly the kind of movie to fly in the face of that convention. Have you seen the first one? Literally something gross could happen to Julianne Moore’s face.
