Inside Kingsman's wildest action scenes as spy movie turns 10

When it comes to audacious twists on well-established genres, Matthew Vaughn is something of a go-to guy in Hollywood. Kingsman: The Secret Service, which celebrates its 10th birthday this week, is one of his trademark genre homages — taking on the spy genre in a balls-to-the-wall way that would make even James Bond blush.

Kingsman was controversial when it was first released and, certainly, some of its more gross-out elements don't stack up as well as they should. However, few can deny the impressive technical innovation behind its action sequences. From Kick-Ass and X-Men to 2024 movie Argylle, Vaughn couldn't ever be accused of sleepwalking through unimaginative action, for better or worse.

So, with that in mind, the best way to celebrate Kingsman's 10th anniversary is to take a deep dive into two of those action sequences and reveal some behind-the-scenes secrets about how Vaughn made them happen.

The church fight

Around halfway through Kingsman, Colin Firth's agent Harry Hart is investigating a religious hate group at a church where they're based. The film's real villain, Valentine (Samuel L Jackson), chooses this moment to activate a signal hidden inside phone SIM cards. This signal makes everyone inside the church, including Harry, murderously violent.

Across more than three minutes set to Lynyrd Skynyrd's iconic track Free Bird — November Rain by Guns N Roses was pondered as an option — Harry kicks all kinds of rear end in an apparently unbroken take, interrupted only by a handful of cutaways to other characters watching the massacre.

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The scene involved more than 100 performers, including 20 stunt people to take all of the blows from Firth's character. Of course, the sequence wasn't a true single take, with hidden cuts cleverly hidden amid the action thanks to exquisite design. That didn't make things any easier for Firth, who trained for six months in order to nail the scene.

"It’s all for real. I didn’t want any wirework," Vaughn told EW. "Normally, a scene like that you’d have one hundred cuts: left, right, and centre, shaking the camera around so you have no idea what’s going on. That’s why I think people are surprised by it, because you can actually watch what’s happening and just follow it as a story."

Originally, the scene was nearly seven minutes long and didn't feature any cutaways. It was Mark Millar, author of the original Kingsman comic, who gave Vaughn advice about shortening the scene slightly. "Seeing it relentlessly for seven minutes you’re like: 'Holy s***, I can’t believe what I’m looking at'. It's obscene," Millar told Business Insider. "Matthew asked me if I thought it was too much and I was like: 'I’m feeling it’s too much, and I’m the guy whose been playing video games since 11, and I can’t handle this'.”

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Under the guidance of second unit director Brad Allan and fight arranger Damien Walters, the cast and crew shot the sequence over seven days while editor Eddie Hamilton worked to find the best places to hide cuts. The result is exceptionally effective.

In a behind-the-scenes featurette, Firth said: "Nothing I learned in all of this combat and slaying of people would probably help me if I got into a real situation, but it certainly might help me if I wanted to enter an expressionist dance troupe or something."

Exploding heads

In the final scenes of Kingsman, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) battles to bring an end to Valentine's plan to cull humanity by activating his SIM cards like he did for those in the church. During this time, though, Kingsman agent Merlin (Mark Strong) discovers a failsafe in the implants used to keep Valentine's goons and assorted world leaders safe from the signal. He activates that failsafe, triggering the implants to explode in colourful pyrotechnics.

Read more: Taron Egerton says filming for Kingsman is 'further back in the pipeline' (BANG Showbiz, 2 min read)

Vaughn told EW that he compared the scene to a Busy Berkeley musical in the script. "I always imagined it to be beautiful and brief," he said. "I went to three effects houses because the first two kept going what I call Cronenberg-Scanners style, sort of messy with brains."

The director said it was important for the scene to be psychedelic rather than gory, saying: "I wanted people to forget what they’re looking at and enjoy it." The scene ended up being "the last thing we got ready before delivery" due to the difficulty of finding the right effects company.

As for the US president whose head explodes, Vaughn wanted to make it clear that it wasn't supposed to be then-incumbent president Barack Obama. He said: "This is an attack on all politicians, but the easiest way to making the point where people knew that Valentine was in power was to have the White House. We needed someone who was reminiscent of Obama, so that people got the point."

Read more: Matthew Vaughn Knows ‘Argylle’ Is Not ‘Citizen Kane,’ but He Was Baffled by the Bad Reviews (IndieWire, 2 min read)

Vaughn added that he was confident Obama would find the scene funny, which he was probably right about. Interestingly, presidential politics emerged again with 2017 sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which cut out references to Donald Trump. "I think America’s going through a pretty interesting and rough ride at the moment and I wanted this movie to be escapism," said Vaughn to EW in 2017.

That cut was probably a good call. Something tells me that Trump might have been less willing to laugh about it.

Kingsman is streaming now in the UK on Netflix (until 7 February) and Disney+.