There’s a dead body on the floor next to me with a bullet hole in between its eyes. Even though Academy Award winner Colin Firth is beating up goons with an umbrella on the monitor in front of me, I can’t help but look over at the cadaver. Though obviously a dummy, the prop will no doubt come into use fairly soon here on the set of Kingsman: The Secret Service as a hyper violent spy thriller is exactly what director Matthew Vaughn has in mind. On the other side of the sound stage, tucked inside Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden just outside London, Firth swings his umbrella around so as to catch the handle on the face of an attacker. He attempts it a number of times, sometimes landing it and sometimes failing, but Firth is clearly giving his all to a role that he has never really attempted in previous films.
“I pitched it to him and by the end of the phone call he was like ‘It sounds great,'” director Matthew Vaughn revealed about getting Firth in the role. “He doesn’t really get the chance to do things like this.”
Based on the comic series by Mark Millar and Dave Gibbons, though Vaughn is credited with a “co-plotter” title, Firth takes on the role of Harry Hart. Code named ‘Galahad,’ Hart is a secret agent under the order of the Kingsman, a society of do-gooders that are clearly inspired by the likes of Britain’s most famous spy, James Bond.
