Charlize Theron on playing an immortal warrior in Netflix’s The Old Guard

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Based upon the comic series by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernandez, Netflix's THE OLD GUARD stars Charlize Theron as Andy, aka Andromache the Scythian, an immortal warrior who has led other immortals throughout the centuries. We got our first look at the film last week, and Theron has spoken with Entertainment Weekly about what it took to embody an ancient warrior wielding a massive two-handed battle-axe.

"I had the most incredible shoulders after," Theron said. "I've never had to do anything like that. You have to learn to fight with that ginormous thing in a way where you don't kill the person that you're fighting with." Theron added that THE OLD GUARD is one of the most difficult projects she's ever taken on, and the strenuous action scenes left her with a few injuries. Towards the end of filming, she tore a tendon in her left thumb. "I definitely cried quite a bit," Theron admitted. "Everybody kept saying, ‘This is probably serious,’ and I was like, ‘We can’t talk about that right now. We just have to keep going because what are we going to do? We have three more weeks to shoot. We’ve got to get through it." After production wrapped, Theron needed to have three surgeries on her left arm. Entertainment Weekly also dropped a pair of new images from THE OLD GUARD, which you can see below.

THE OLD GUARD finds Andy (Theron) having led a small team of immortals through history, but "avoiding detection is trickier in the 21st century than it was in the ninth, and soon the Old Guard are targeted by mysterious enemies who are eager to unlock the secrets of their immortality." The team is joined by a U.S. Marine named Nile (KiKi Layne), who is their first new immortal recruit in centuries. Andy becomes something of a reluctant mentor to Niles, as the two bond over the loneliness which immortality brings. "Most people can’t relate to slinging a giant sword around [and] really messing people up," Layne said. "But people can relate to experiencing loss, or experiencing something that changed the trajectory of their life." Director Gina Prince-Bythewood added that the two characters are "warriors" and that she wanted "to be able to reframe what it means to be female with this film and make that a normal thing: our toughness and badassness and courage. To normalize that was really important to me."

THE OLD GUARD will debut on Netflix on July 10, 2020.