Charlize and KiKi get their comic-book kicks
‘BADASS broads’ are a rarity on the cinema screen. Charlize Theron has nailed two of them and she’s about to add a third to her CV. The Oscar-winner will star in the film adaptation of The Old Guard, a five-issue comic book series by writer Greg Rucka and illustrator Leandro Fernandez about immortal warriors led by Andronika the Scythian; or Andy for short. Theron’s Andy battles alongside two opposing soldiers from The Crusades; a French Renaissance thief; and the latest recruit, Nile, a U.S. marine who will be played by KiKi Layne, the newcomer from Cincinnati who’s so good in Barry jenkins’ visual poem if Beale Street Could Talk. The Old Guard’s authors describe their work as a ‘fairytale of blood and bullets’. Theron knows this terrain well, having played post-apocalyptic combatant imperator Furiosa in mad max: Fury Road and savage spy Lorraine Broughton in Atomic Blonde (sequels for both movies are under discussion). But it’s rare to have two women playing comrades in arms (and swords) in the same picture. The source material comics are real page-turners as Rucka and Fernandez take us through battlefields down the ages and around the globe. One tale hurtles us into skirmishes involving Shoguns in feudal japan. Andy’s very, very old — 5,000 years old, in fact; an Amazon from the Herodotus age of ancient Greece — and she’s got no idea why she’s still alive. Film- maker Gina Prince- Bythewood, who made The Secret Life Of Bees and the woefully underrated Beyond The Lights (starring a stunning Gugu mbatha-Raw), will direct the picture this year on several locations, including sets in London and morocco.