Legacy has been top of mind for Uma Thurman: It’s the primary reason she all but entirely avoided the action genre since “Kill Vill Vol. 2” came out in 2004.
That’s about to change with her appearance in Netflix’s “The Old Guard 2,” as the villain Discord. It took a particularly special film to get Thurman out of action-movie retirement, she said on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” June 17.
“I never really followed ‘Kill Bill‘ up with action because I didn’t kind of want to be in a whole bunch of ‘B’ action movies,” Thurman said. “When you do ‘Kill Bill,’ you never stop hearing about, you know, it’s like, ‘Oh, got to be very careful about what I do next.’ So I did other stuff.”
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That meant, post-“Kill Bill,” Thurman appeared in the musical “The Producers,” rom-coms like “Playing for Keeps,” and auteur projects such as Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” and “The House that Jack Built” and Paul Schrader’s “Oh, Canada!” But never really action again, until “The Old Guard 2.” The first movie, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and starring Charlize Theron, who returns for the sequel, impressed Thurman with its “depth” and by being “quite moving.” In fact, she had such regard for Theron’s work on that film that when Fallon asked her if being in this movie gave Thurman an opportunity to “show everyone how it’s done,” she had a pointed response.
“I didn’t think I was going to show anybody how it’s done after I saw Charlize in ‘Old Guard 1,’” Thurman said. “This one seemed different [from other action movies she was offered] because in ‘Old Guard 1’ Charlize was just so epic in it. And so I thought, ‘Well, I could go do this for her in that. Where she’s kind of taking the genre there. I’ll go support her and fight her and battle her out.’”
“Putting her toe” into the action genre again, as she put it, didn’t come quite as easily to Thurman as one might have thought, in part because she came aboard the project late and didn’t have time for training beforehand.
“Oh, if only I could have trained,” she said. “No, I came on to do it kind of at the end. So I had no training. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, a sword. I think I hold it like this.’”
Sounds like someone needs a return visit to Hattori Hanzo.
