Warning: SPOILERS ahead for The Old Guard.
The Old Guard's Andromache the Scythian a.k.a. Andy (Charlize Theron) is 6,732 years old according to the comic books upon which the Netflix movie is based - and her immortal companions are pretty ancient as well. Though Andy's age is deliberately kept ambiguous in the movie, marketing materials for the other characters in The Old Guard make it possible to work out exactly how old they are.
Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and based on the comics by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández, The Old Guard follows a team of warriors who have lived in the shadows for centuries, taking part in conflicts on whichever side they feel is right. The movie is set in the modern day, where a new immortal - soldier Nile Freeman (Kiki Layne) - joins the group after miraculously healing from having her throat cut. While she's still learning about her new family, they come under threat from a greedy pharmaceutical executive called Steven Merrick (Harry Melling), who hopes to discover the secret to their immortality, bottle it, and put a price tag on it.
Unfortunately for Merrick, he's not the first bad guy that the Old Guard have run into during their very long lifetimes. Here's a breakdown of when each member of the group besides Andy was born, and how old they are in the modern day setting of the movie.
Seen only in flashbacks and in The Old Guard's final scene, Quynh's (Veronica Ngo) age is perhaps the hardest to pin down out of all the immortals. In the comics she's called Noriko, and Andy recalls that they first met at the end of Amr ibn al-As al-Sahmi's conquest of the Byzantine Empire in 642, at which point Noriko had already been an immortal for a century. That puts her date of birth some time in early 500 AD, which would make her around 1500 years old during the events of The Old Guard.
However, in the movie it's not specified exactly when or where Andy and Quynh met, except that Andy found Quynh when she was wandering through the desert, and that she was the first other immortal that Andy ever met. In the comics, Andy met Lykon (Micheal Ward) before she met Noriko, and they fought together for two thousand years before his wounds finally stopped healing during the Italian Renaissance. Lykon also appears briefly in a flashback in The Old Guard, with Andy and Quynh both being present at the time of his death. If Quynh has been aged up in order to have been born before Lykon, she could actually be several thousand years old during the events of the movie. Hopefully we'll learn more about her backstory - including her age - in The Old Guard 2.
According to his character poster, Joe (Marwan Kenzari) was born in 1066, making him 954 years old at the time The Old Guard takes place, and in his early thirties at the time of his first death. Originally called Yusuf Al-Kaysani before he changed his name to Joe Jones (in order to attract less attention), Joe was a Muslim warrior during the First Crusade, who met the love of his life on the battlefield... and then killed him. Fortunately for both of them, fate chose them as the next immortals to join the Old Guard, and after repeatedly slaying each other they realized that neither they nor the enemy soldier could be killed - at which point their enmity turned to love.
Younger than Joe by only a few years (which grew even less significant as the centuries pass), Nicky (Luca Marinelli) is 951 years old during the events of The Old Guard, based on a character poster than gives his year of birth as 1069. This means that he would have been in his late twenties - 30 at most - the first time he died. Like Joe and Andy, Nicky changed his name at some point from Nicoló of Genoa to the more common name of Nick Smith, in order to aid his anonymity. Hailing from the city of Genoa, in what would later become the unified country of Italy, Nicky fought in the First Crusade until he fell in love with one of the enemy, and instead began fighting new battles alongside him. After settling their differences, Joe and Nicky both met Andy and became part of the Old Guard alongside her and Quynh.
The baby of the group (at least, until Nile comes along), Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) is 250 years old during the events of The Old Guard, with his character poster marking his year of birth as 1770. Born Sebastien le Livre (his nickname comes from his surname, which is French for "Book"), Booker was a soldier under Napoleon who deserted during the campaign into Russia. He was caught and hanged, but came back to life still hanging from the noose, being 42 years old at the time of this first death in 1812. As he lived on without ageing, Booker experienced the trauma of watching his sons die and being helpless to stop them, even as they grew to hate him for not sharing his gift of immortality. Being a young immortal, the 100-year penance that Booker is sentenced to at the end of The Old Guard would still be a significant amount of time for him.
A brand new member of the Old Guard, Nile Freeman is 26 years when she dies for the first time, having her throat cut while trying to save the life of a man she has just shot. After she wakes up in the infirmary without a mark to show for her injury, she's shunned by her fellow soldiers and about to be sent away for some probably very unpleasant testing when she's abducted by Andy. Nile has a military legacy to uphold, with her father having been killed in action, but also has a family that she's at first keen to return to. By the end of the movie, however, she has decided to stick with Andy and the other immortals, having seen the good that they've managed to do in the world.
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July 23, 2020 at 05:47AM
