The King’s Man is opening in theaters across the country todayOur own Hunter Radesi recently got a chance to sit down with stars Djimon Hounsou and Rhys Ifans for an extensive interview. Talk naturally turned to their roles in the prequel film in Matthew Vaughn’s acclaimed Kingsman series where Ifans is playing the villainous Grigori Rasputin, while Hounsou is playing Shola, one of the first King’s men. In the interview, Hounsou talked about some of what fans can expect regarding the fight scenes and how he made sure it was him doing the fighting.
Of course I did quite a bit of extensive training. Rhys and I had different times scheduled for training, but we knew the choreography going into it. We’ve never gone off on each other like that though, so we were trying to save that for later so that we wouldn’t hurt one another. That’s one way to look at it, but it was a tough one to do.
The conversation naturally pivoted to Hounsou’s experience in fight scenes, beginning with Blood Diamond and then being fleshed out in other films:
I’ve obviously done a lot of fight sequences before. Action is something that I like and that I enjoy doing, but on this one with Matthew (Vaughn), I had no idea to what degree he requests and demands the action to be more epic than we’ve ever seen. More different and more engaging than we’ve ever seen. That came with a bit of a price tag, in terms of physicality.
As Hounsou said, he’s no stranger to action sequences, having starred in the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Fast and the Furious franchise; however, as the trailers have indicated, audiences are in for something special with what he’s put on film in The King’s Man which is now playing in theaters.
