SPOILERS are forward for The Old Guard 2, now streaming with a Netflix subscription.
The Old Guard 2 is a kind of 2025 Netflix releases I’ve been extremely anticipating for years because of the cliffhanger ending of the final film. Within the 2020 motion hit, I was swept away by the connection between Charlize Theron’s Andy and Veronica Ngo’s Quynh, which spanned hundreds of years earlier than they had been torn aside 500 years earlier than the occasions of The Old Guard motion pictures. So, after all, I needed to ask the director about bringing Quynh to the current day for the sequel.
Throughout my interview with The Old Guard’s Victoria Mahoney, together with breaking down the ending with me, I requested her about bringing the character who was experiencing loss of life time and again in her underwater casket for half a millennium again to life. I’ve been so interested by how she would react to waking up from her private hell. In Mahoney’s phrases:
So let’s spend 5 seconds speaking about Veronica and the way she performed note-for-note scene-for-scene, sequence-for-sequence and the way she grew and constructed and elevated that storyline. She by no means overpassed 500 years underwater. Now we’d snort off digicam since you’re identical to, I imply, realistically, who may actually think about that?
I haven’t seen Veronica Ngo in lots of different motion pictures except for The Old Guard, however I remembered her in her small however important position in Star Wars: The Final Jedi. Because the director spoke about, she had a tricky job of capturing the unimaginable with the storyline of Quynh.
Apparently, it’s one thing that she and Mahoney talked quite a bit about on the set of The Old Guard 2. As she continued:
We might go into very in-depth discussions about physiologically what it means to be underwater that lengthy, psychologically what it means spiritually, emotionally, neurologically, after which emotionally on the subject of self and others. So the ache, the sentence, even if you say it’s, I’m fairly certain for various causes, there are numerous individuals everywhere in the planet proper now aching as a result of somebody didn’t come on the lookout for them.
The Old Guard 2 is being panned by critics and audiences alike (after the film itself underwent reshoots after its preliminary manufacturing), however one fascinating thread I discovered heartbreaking is Quynh’s disappointment over Andy not being the one to search out her and rescue her from her underwater jail. Whereas Andy traveled throughout the ocean to search for her for hundreds of years, she was nonetheless gutted that crucial individual to her wasn’t the one who pulled her out. Mahoney defined this side of the film additional:
And their query is, why did not you come search for me? Why did not you come get me? And the dance these two have of rescue, fixing and saving one another is so fascinating and compelling. And, the scene within the flashback with Andy when she’s driving to go to Rome to satisfy Quynh for the primary time in 500 years, and she or he stops, and there is that flashback within the Viking instances. That entire scene was splendidly constructed to mirror that Quyhn in that second saved Andy from her darker self.
In the end issues appear to finish fortunately for Andy and Quynh contemplating they select to group up on the finish of the film to avoid wasting the Old Guard when they’re put in dire hazard by Uma Thurman’s Discord. Even so, I completely agree with the director in regards to the heartbreaking implications of their story within the sequel, as a result of though these characters have extra time to dwell, it maybe solely makes the sensation of heartbreak extra poignant and intense.
Thank goodness they make up by the ultimate moments, however given the film’s newest cliffhanger ending, the battle isn’t over for them… but once more.