TheOldGuard Director Gina Prince-Bythewood on Casting KiKi Layne
“I, for a long while, never thought I’d get the opportunity to make one given the way Hollywood loves to work,” Prince-Bythewood, 51, tells. “But then Patty Jenkins did ‘Wonder Woman’ and did such a phenomenal job that, that creaked the door open just a little bit.”
“The Old Guard” writer Greg Rucka also wrote the screenplay. “I love the way that dude’s mind works, the fact that he creates these women in the comic book space who are just bad-ass and warriors, but not hyper-sexualized and all of that was in ’The Old Guard,’ in addition to the fact that one of these two female leads was a young Black female hero, which we never get to see and absolutely need to see,” Prince-Bythwood said. “Within five pages of reading, I was in.
“I was like, ‘Wow, she is really good, but no way could she be Nile. She’s just too soft,’” she said. “And then she came into audition and within five seconds, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Nile.’ She had that innate strength, but also the innate vulnerability and this innate goodness. KiKi in real life is a light and she brought that to the role and I believed her in every moment and she had the desire to be great.
As the film opens in the era of Black Lives Matter, it seems Hollywood may be catching up to Prince-Bythewood, who has focused her career on putting Black women in front of the camera. “I feel like I’ve been in a sustained fight for 20 years in putting Black women up on screen,” she said. “Those are absolutely the hardest films to get made, but there’s a few of us and we have to stay in the fight.
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