Kingsman 2 is going international, and that means those British gentleman spies are about to come face to face with America's espionage experts, the CIA, but who's going to play the big boss? Deadline reports that Halle Berry is in talks to join the film as a CIA head in what would be a two-picture deal. Berry would join returning star Taron Edgerton as Eggsy, and potentially Julianne Moore, who was recently in talks to play the new Big Bad.
Writer/Director Matthew Vaughn is set to return for Kingsman 2, his first time returning to helm a sequel, which is encouraging on a project that has such an idiosyncratic and razor sharp tone. The original film, based on Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons' comic book of the same name, trampled expectations to gross $128 million domestically and another $286 million internationally for a worldwide total of $414.4 million.
Steve spoke with Egerton back at Sundance where the actor teased Kingsman 2's broader international scope and touted a villain to top Samuel L. Jackson's unconventional ecoterrorist, Richmond Valentine:
“With Kingsman2, we’re shooting in the summer at present. There’s a script, it’s brilliant. Obviously there’s only so much I can say but what I can say is that we shot [the first] one all in the U.K., that won’t be the case with the next one. It’s a far more international story, we’re going to some incredible places, and we have a villain to rival Samuel L. Jackson—this new one is so brilliantly written I wish I could play it. It’s amazing.”
There are no details on Berry's role, friend or foe, and a CIA type character could go either way -- a well-trained ally or a bureaucratic nuisance, especially now that Eggsy is a fully-trained agent. Then again, considering how Vaughn embraced eccentricity and subverted expectations with such verve in the first film, we can likely count on the new characters to be more than your conventional genre archetypes.
