SPOILERS are ahead for The Old Guard 2, now streaming with a Netflix subscription.
The Old Guard 2 is one of those 2025 Netflix releases I’ve been highly anticipating for years thanks to the cliffhanger ending of the last movie. In the 2020 action hit, I was swept away by the relationship between Charlize Theron’s Andy and Veronica Ngo’s Quynh, which spanned thousands of years before they were torn apart 500 years before the events of The Old Guard movies. So, of course, I had to ask the director about bringing Quynh to the present day for the sequel.
During my interview with The Old Guard’s Victoria Mahoney, along with breaking down the ending with me, I asked her about bringing the character who was experiencing death over and over in her underwater casket for half a millennium back to life. I've been so curious about how she would react to waking up from her personal hell. In Mahoney's words:
So let's spend five seconds talking about Veronica and how she played note-for-note scene-for-scene, sequence-for-sequence and how she grew and built and elevated that storyline. She never lost sight of 500 years underwater. Now we would laugh off camera because you're just like, I mean, realistically, who could really imagine that?
I haven’t seen Veronica Ngo in many other movies aside from The Old Guard, but I remembered her in her small but vital role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. As the director spoke about, she had a tough job of capturing the unimaginable with the storyline of Quynh.
Apparently, it’s something that she and Mahoney talked a lot about on the set of The Old Guard 2. As she continued:
We would go into very in-depth discussions about physiologically what it means to be underwater that long, psychologically what it means spiritually, emotionally, neurologically, and then emotionally with regards to self and others. So the pain, the sentence, even when you say it is, I'm pretty sure for a number of reasons, there are countless people all over the planet right now aching because someone did not come looking for them.
The Old Guard 2 is being panned by critics and audiences alike (after the movie itself underwent reshoots after its initial production), but one interesting thread I found heartbreaking is Quynh’s sadness over Andy not being the one to find her and rescue her from her underwater prison. While Andy traveled across the ocean to look for her for centuries, she was still gutted that the most important person to her wasn’t the one who pulled her out. Mahoney explained this aspect of the movie further:
And their question is, why didn't you come look for me? Why didn't you come get me? And the dance these two have of rescue, fixing and saving each other is so fascinating and compelling. And, the scene in the flashback with Andy when she's driving to go to Rome to meet Quynh for the first time in 500 years, and she stops, and there's that flashback in the Viking times. That whole scene was wonderfully constructed to reflect that Quyhn in that moment saved Andy from her darker self.
Ultimately things seem to end happily for Andy and Quynh considering they choose to team up at the end of the movie to save the Old Guard when they are put in dire danger by Uma Thurman’s Discord. Even so, I totally agree with the director about the heartbreaking implications of their story in the sequel, because even though these characters have more time to live, it perhaps only makes the feeling of heartbreak more poignant and intense.
Thank goodness they make up by the final moments, but given the movie’s latest cliffhanger ending, the fight isn’t over for them... yet again.
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