Charlie actress from atomic blondie

2017 film by David Leitch

For other uses, see Atomic blonde.

Not to be confused with Atomic (Blondie song).

Atomic Blonde is a 2017 American action thriller film directed by David Leitch (receiving his first credit as feature film director) from a screenplay by Kurt Johnstad, based on the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City by Antony Johnston and Sam Hart. The film stars Charlize Theron (who also served as a co-producer), James McAvoy, John Goodman, Til Schweiger, Eddie Marsan, Sofia Boutella, and Toby Jones. The story revolves around a spy who has to find a list of covert agents that is being smuggled into the West on the eve of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Atomic Blonde premiered at South by Southwest on March 12, 2017, and was released in the United States on July 28, by Focus Features. The film was a box-office hit, grossing $100 million worldwide against a budget of $30 million, and received generally positive reviews from critics. Many compared the film to the John Wick series, for which Leitch was an uncredited co-director and producer of the first film. As of April 2020, a sequel was in development.

Plot

In November 1989, days before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, KGB agent Yuri Bakhtin kills MI6 agent James Gascoigne and steals his watch containing The List, a microfilm document with the names of every intelligence agent active in Berlin.

A day later, top-level MI6 spy Lorraine Broughton is dispatched to recover The List. She is told to keep an eye out for Satchel, a mysterious double agent for the KGB. Arriving in Berlin, she encounters two KGB agents with a message from their boss, Aleksander Bremovych. She escapes them and is picked up by her real contact, maverick MI6 station head David Percival. Lorraine searches Gascoigne's apartment and discovers a picture of him and Percival. Percival had previously denied knowing Gascoigne, so she suspects Pe

About halfway through “Atomic Blonde,” Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron), a lethal MI6 superwoman on assignment in Cold War-era Berlin, goes to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.” OK, not really. Her latest intrigue leads her to an Alexanderplatz theater showing that 1979 Soviet slow-cinema masterwork, setting the stage for an ultra-cool fight scene in which she kicks, punches and even face-stabs her opponent, all while silhouetted against Tarkovsky’s famously somber, unblinking images.

There are all sorts of ways to interpret this bold juxtaposition, which can be defended as homage, attacked as desecration or (most accurately) diagnosed as evidence of this movie’s hopeless infatuation with its own fabulous retro style. Obsessive “Stalker” fans might offer up a more literal-minded reading: Charlize Theron is, like, totally in the Zone!

They’ll get no argument from me. It’s been thrilling to see Theron ascend to the very top ranks of Hollywood action stars, her position confirmed by her magnificent turn as Imperator Furiosa in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and not too badly threatened by her recent appearance in “The Fate of the Furious” or my distant memories of “Aeon Flux.” In “Atomic Blonde,” the actress has become an avatar of icy, murderous impassivity. To see her attacking thugs with kitchen appliances or submerging her battered body in a frigid bath is to be happily reminded that sometimes the movies get it right — even when the movie itself, in this case, seems largely beside the point.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair. Adapted by Kurt Johnstad from Antony Johnston’s and Sam Hart’s graphic-novel series “The Coldest City,” “Atomic Blonde” may be a delirious exercise in outré nonsense, but it can also be a brutally effective action picture when the inspiration strikes. Its director is David Leitch, a longtime stuntman and second unit whiz who served as an uncredited

Atomic Blonde 2 has been in development for a long time, but concrete updates have been few and far between.

The sequel to Charlie Theron's 2017 action thriller, directed by John Wick's David Leitch and distributed by Universal's Focus Features, was first confirmed to be in development in 2018 when the actress revealed that she had successfully pitched the idea to Netflix.

In 2020, it was further confirmed that the movie was happening as a Netflix exclusive film. Theron was expected to return as Lorraine Broughton, though a screenwriter had not been brought aboard yet.

Atomic Blonde 2 Gets Development Update From Director

While speaking with The Direct during a celebration event for the tenth anniversary of John Wick, Atomic Blonde director David Leitch gave a disappointing update on the status of Atomic Blonde 2.

"Everyone's still trying to unravel rights issues," he explained, adding that he does not have any updates past that:

"Everyone's still trying to unravel rights issues, and it had traveled from Universal to Netflix for a bit, and then now it's become a little bit of a bottleneck of too many forces working against each other to try and get it made, because it's such a great piece of IP and would be amazing to go back and revisit that world and that character. So, hopefully we can get it done..."

What Would an Atomic Blonde 2 Look Like?

There are certainly questions after the first Atomic Blonde ends that are begging to be answered, such as where Lorraine Broughton's real loyalty lies.

There is plenty of desire from those involved in the first film to continue the story established in Charlie Theron's stylish debut as the Cold War secret agent.

Kurt Johnstad, the writer for the first Atomic Blonde, confirmed to CinemaBlend that he has always felt that the first film was the start of a trilogy. Sadly, as of the interview earlier this yea

Charlize Theron is the rare movie star who does the vast majority of her own stunts, according to David Leitch. 

The director of 2017’s box office hitAtomic Blonde, starring the Oscar-winning actress, 48, as a top-level spy, tells PEOPLE that there was exceedingly little trickery in her epic fight scenes. And considering Leitch got his start as a double for the likes of Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, he knows exactly how rare that is. 

“That stairwell fight that we created, that's 99 percent her," says the 48-year-old filmmaker behind The Fall Guy (in theaters now). "Except for a couple places where we threw [stunt coordinator] Monique Ganderton down the stairs.”

Charlize Theron Gets Candid About Motherhood and Finding Joy in Her ‘Two Nuggets’ When It ‘Gets Hard’ (Exclusive)

That particular fight, one of the spy thriller’s more mind-boggling sequences, appears to be a single 10-minute-long take in which Theron hits, kicks and stabs her way up a building’s staircase, back down and then out onto the street, hijacking a police car and shooting yet more assailants. As Variety reported upon the movie’s release, the shot is actually almost 40 takes edited painstakingly together. 

Theron trained in martial arts for six weeks prior to filming, stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave told PEOPLE at the time.

"She showed that she could do 10, 15, 20, 30 moves in succession without needing to cut or reset... We were like, 'Wow, this is special. This is unique. We need to take advantage of this.' ”

“It's really Charlize learning all that choreography, taking those hits,” recalls Leitch almost seven years later.

While on most movie sets, stunt professionals are there to perform the most violent or dangerous moves, there are stars like Theron who work with the pros on choreographing, rehearsing and ensuring safety on set. “The