The King's Man pits Oxford's agents against The Shepherd's, but which of the movie's characters were real-life spies from the First World War? BY CHARLES CAMERON
Although The King's Man is a largely fictionalized action movie, Matthew Vaughn's wartime drama does contain several characters that were real-life spies. First released domestically on December 22nd, 2021, The King's Man draws on real-life events for much of its action-packed 131-minute runtime, with the horrors of World War I forming a poignant backdrop to the Kingsman origin story. This inspiration extends to the vast majority of The King's Man's main characters, some of which were real-life spies during the time period in which they lived.
The King's Man naturally takes wholesale creative liberties with its historic-centric narrative, instead utilizing the First World War as a means to evoke a sense of time and place. Director Matthew Vaughn's movie reimagines many of the key historical players between 1914 and 1918 as pawns in a deadly game of cat and mouse between Orlando Oxford's (Ralph Fiennes) secret service and The Shepherd's (Matthew Goode) espionage agents. This exhilarating version of events, therefore, sees prominent and controversial historical faces such as Grigori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans) and Vladimir Lenin (August Diehl) engage in covert operations as they attempt to undermine the Allied powers.
