Matthew Vaughn on Finding The Man Who Would Be King’s Man | Den of Geek

So began the first step to this holiday season’s The King’s Man, a cheeky and overtly stylish action movie that is, yes, a prequel to the 2015 surprise smash, Kingsman: The Secret Service, but also a proper spy adventure set during the First World War. In the new film, lead characters Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) interact with real historic figures like the literal King of England (Tom Hollander), as well as Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian noble whose bizarre assassination in Serbia shockingly triggered the Great War.

When we chat with Vaughn, he reveals that he never intended to do a Kingsman prequel back in 2015. Similarly, the WWI angle was more or less decided for him by the dropped line in the first picture about the Kingsman organization being founded after the war—“I couldn’t say, ‘Know what? I’m going to change the folklore,’” Vaughn laughs. But by digging into the history around World War I, he was struck by just how startling the details still are.

For instance, the scene where (spoiler) Archduke Ferdinand is slaughtered in the streets of Sarajevo really did involve a royal swatting away the first grenade intended for their car, causing it to blow up beneath another vehicle in the procession. In The King’s Man, it just gets to be Conrad who prevents the initial attempt on Ferdinand’s life.

That’s small potatoes though when compared to how a character like Grigori Rasputin is realized on-screen. In history, Rasputin was a self-proclaimed holy man in Imperial Russia who managed to capture the ear of Tsar Nicholas II. But on-screen he’s played by Rhys Ifans as a gregarious demon who will attempt to seduce anything on two legs, and when that doesn’t work settles for instigating one of the best fight scenes in years.

“I could never come up with a person like Rasputin,” Vaughn marvels. “What an amazing, amazing character.”

That might be, but he can come up with dynamic action for such a person. As with the best set-pieces in Vaughn’s action movie oeuvre—from Chloe Grace Moretz’s Hit-Girl rescuing Nicolas Cage in Kick-Ass to Colin Firth obliterating an entire church filled with possessed bigots in a single take during Kingsman—the scene where Fiennes locks swords with Rasputin’s high kicks is a case study in precise, giddy choreography and stunt work. For Vaughn’s part, he doesn’t think he asks his actors or stuntmen to perform feats that different from other filmmakers; he just knows how to frame them.