‘The Old Guard 2’ director explains big twist and shocker ending

This article contains spoilers for The Old Guard 2.

After an hour and a half of twists, turns, and thrills, The Old Guard 2 ends on a major cliffhanger, with the fates of most of its characters left in the balance.

The film picks up mostly where the 2020 original left off, with Andy (Charlize Theron) and Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) once more leading immortal warriors Joe (Marwan Kenzari), Nicky (Luca Marinelli), Nile (KiKi Layne) and (supposed-to-be-exiled) Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) in their mission to protect humanity. New to the gang is Tuah (Henry Golding), an old friend and fellow immortal who is an expert on all things immortality.

This time around, they come up against long-lost immortal Quynh (Veronica Ngô), out for revenge after escaping her underwater grave, who is working with Discord (Uma Thurman), the first and seemingly most formidable immortal. We also learn that Nile, as “the last immortal,” has the ability to make mortal any of the others by wounding them, and, perhaps more importantly, any immortal can transfer their immortality to one who has lost it. By film’s end, it’s revealed that Discord has actually lost her immortality. To get it back, she plans to force Nile to take the other’s immortality and transfer the power to herself.

They don’t go down without an epic fight, but in the end, Booker dies (and seemingly atones for his betrayal from the first film in the process) after transferring his immortality to Andy and then fighting off Discord’s henchmen, allowing her to escape. After a rooftop swordfight with Andy, Discord makes off with a captured Nile, Copley, Joe, Tuah, and Nicky. Distraught, Andy vows to go after them. She makes peace with Quynh, and the film ends as they run out the door together, weapons in hand.

Director Victoria Mahoney wants the audience to know none of these decisions were taken lightly. With regards to Booker’s demise and the transference of immortality, Mahoney tells Entertainment Weekly there were so many discussions about how to portray it that it was like “we were possessed by a demonic spirit, that’s how overtaken we were with that discussion.”

The goal, she says, was to introduce the idea of transference in a way that would not create plot holes in either movie. And, perhaps most importantly, it needed to be done in such a way that “we use language that the actors could plausibly dictate,” meaning not too unbelievable.

“Fortunately, we have incredible actors and we just had to find a way to make it truthful and make it make sense for them,” Mahoney explains. “And then we didn’t have to sell them or sell the audience because really, you see the way they play it.”

Transference, therefore, is told but not shown. There’s no CGI or cheesy effects to denote that it’s happened. A sequence in Tuah’s cavernous library between him and Booker is the closest thing to an explanation. And that was very much by design. “That scene with Tuah and Booker in the library, and they go in and Booker comes to Tuah and they have this wonderful exchange — it’s so respectful and honorable,” Mahoney says. “And then what’s fascinating is what they’re not saying, what’s underneath the dialogue, and the way that Tuah posits his theory, and then the way that Booker receives it and you see he’s studying and telling himself, ‘I can give Andy back this thing that I took and I can be free.'”

She continues, “You can see it was a beautiful, beautiful, tiny thing. You can see the wheels going, and I love that. And those two actors in that particular scene did a lot of lifting that could have been really hokey, pokey, jokey — but it’s not.”

As for the decision to end the film with so much left unresolved, with Quynh and Andy linking arms and heading out to fight, Mahoney says that this also sparked many debates among the filmmaking team. “There were multiple discussions and multiple choices. There really was,” she says. “And through the process of filming, it was just like maybe it’s a luxury problem. You really could go a few different ways.”

Production banner Skydance Media posited that “it wasn’t dark and heavy at the end,” Mahoney says, a sentiment with which she agreed. “Leaving people at that last moment was something that I was interested in because I just feel like there are some dark and heavy things going on that for me as a viewer, I don’t mind having complicated emotions and complexity in a movie, but at the moment, I don’t know if I really want to just be ending things in the dark and I have to walk around doing the laundry with this heaviness on my heart. I mean, who needs that? We already have it. So I was all for any expression that would allow people to smile and wonder and root and cheer and have a sense of curiosity.”

Mahoney says after all the discussions and debates, everyone eventually agreed, and by the time they arrived at the decision, she also felt it made the most sense for the story, specifically with regards to Quynh and Andy’s arcs across both films. “I was struggling and losing sleep at night with the reason of bringing back Quynh, this prominent wonderful character. And then as this [ending] discussion came forward, it was really exciting,” she explains. “Then I was like, now she has a purpose for existing. And then Andy has now shape-shifted in a way, she’s returned back to who she was prior to the first film, and the broken part of her in the first film when Quynh was gone is mended.”

All that to say, Mahoney’s biggest hope for audiences is that “they understand the yardstick with which we measured the gravitas of that decision.”

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Even still, it’s impossible to see the way the film ends and not imagine it’s a setup for a third entry. To that end, Mahoney has an update, but it may not be the one fans want to hear. “I genuinely don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on outside this room. So I have no idea. I hope for it, and I hope that audiences get it, and I hope everyone that goes to play on that third one has a ball and kicks ass and I’ll be rooting for them. I won’t be there, but I will be rooting for them. Sincerely, vigorously.”