Legacy has been uppermost in Uma Thurman’s mind: It’s the main reason she’s largely avoided the action genre since “Kill Vill Vol. 2” was released 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 bring Thurman out of action movie retirement, she said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” on June 17.
“I never really followed ‘Kill Bill’ with action, because I didn’t want to be in a bunch of ‘B’ action movies,” Thurman said. “When you kill Bill, you never stop hearing about, you know, it’s like, ‘Oh, I have to be really careful what I do next.’ So I did other things.”
This meant that post-“Kill Bill,” Thurman appeared in the musical “The Producers,” rom-coms like “Play for Keeps,” and auteur projects like Lars Von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” and Paul Schrader’s “The House That Jack Built” and “Oh, Oh, Canada!” But she never acted again until “The Old Guard 2.” The first film, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and starring Charlize Theron, who returns for the sequel, impressed Thurman with its “depth” and “pretty moving.” In fact, she thought so highly of Theron’s work in that film that when Fallon asked her if being in this movie gave Thurman the opportunity to “show everyone how it’s done,” she had a pointed response.
“I didn’t think I was going to show anyone how it’s done after seeing Charlize in ‘Old Guard 1,’” Thurman said. “This one felt different [from other action movies she was offered] because in ‘Old Guard 1,’ Charlize was so epic in it. And so I thought, ‘Well, I could do that for her in this. Where she’s kind of taking the genre there. I’m going to support her and fight with her and fight against her.’”
“Getting her feet back on her feet” in the action genre again, as she put it, didn’t come as easily to Thurman as one might have thought, in part because she came on board the project late and didn’t have time to train beforehand.
“Oh, if I could have trained,” she said. “No, I did 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.'”
Looks like someone needs a return visit to Hattori Hanzo.
