Similarly, the WWI angle was more or less decided for him by the dropped line in the first picture about the Kingsman organization being founded after the war-“I couldn’t say, ‘Know what? I’m going to change the folklore,’” Vaughn laughs. When we chat with Vaughn, he reveals that he never intended to do a Kingsman prequel back in 2015.

In the new film, lead characters Orlando Oxford ( Ralph Fiennes) and his son Conrad (Harris Dickinson) interact with real historic figures like the literal King of England (Tom Hollander), as well as Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian noble whose bizarre assassination in Serbia shockingly triggered the Great War. So began the first step to this holiday season’s The King’s Man, a cheeky and overtly stylish action movie that is, yes, a prequel to the 2015 surprise smash, Kingsman: The Secret Service, but also a proper spy adventure set during the First World War. When it was over, Vaughn turned and said, “Why don’t I make The Man Who Would Be Kingsman?” It was epic, adventurous, emotion, a great story, and some important statements, politically and morally.” “I was laughing that there was a Kingsman already in it… and it had everything a movie should have.

“I forgot just how amazing it was,” Vaughn tells Den of Geek on the eve of The King’s Man’s theatrical release. They inspired him to approach his whole Kingsman universe, which he has developed across three films at his production company, Marv Studios, from an entirely different angle: one where the proverbial stiff upper lip was never raised higher, the sun had yet to set on the British Empire, and blokes like Danny and Peachy could get in over their heads and still be proper gentlemen about it as the ground (or rope bridge) vanished beneath their feet. They more than charmed Vaughn during a recent rewatch, however.

It doesn’t end well for either, and yet there is something so adroit about the performances that they never cease to charm. The John Huston adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling yarn is one of the best adventure films ever made, not least of all because Huston and his co-screenwriter Gladys Hill were able to quietly insert some anti-imperialist critiques into the story of Danny and Peachy (Sean Connery and Michael Caine), two former British sergeants in 19th century India who turn soldiers of fortune and, eventually, men who might call themselves living gods. Matthew Vaughn loves watching The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

Kipling the man who would be king