Peek into the UK’s secret his­to­ry in The King’s Man trailer

The recent series of Kings­man spy pic­tures have met with robust gross­es and wide-span­ning pop­u­lar­i­ty, and yet the two install­ments have left so many ques­tions unan­swered. What were Eggsy’s par­ents think­ing when they land­ed on that name? What’s with the note of faint homo­eroti­cism in what’s sup­posed to be a pater­nal rela­tion­ship between Eggsy and Har­ry? And where did all this – the secret order, their Sav­ile Row head­quar­ters, their mis­sion – come from?

A new pre­quel titled The King’s Man will answer that last ques­tion, turn­ing the cal­en­dars back to the dawn of the 20^th cen­tu­ry to depict the con­cep­tion and found­ing of Kings­man. The title, sources close to the project have revealed, is a play on words.

Har­ris Dick­in­son (of Beach Rats fame, last seen at Cannes dab­bing in Xavier Dolan​‘s new film Matthias and Maxime) and Ralph Fiennes bring the Eggsy-Har­ry dynam­ic to the 1900s, where the younger man plays a fic­ti­tious appren­tice to the great sol­dier and adven­tur­er T.E. Lawrence. The so-called ​“Lawrence of Ara­bia” appears here in dash­ing form as a hero con­vinced that he can best serve his native Eng­land not in the Army, but through covert means.

He, the young Con­rad, and a cabal of oth­er notable names from UK his­to­ry band togeth­er to form an under­ground orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to keep­ing the world free from harm — think the Avengers, but with stiffer upper lips and tea breaks. Among their ranks: scorched-earth mil­i­tary man Her­bert Kitch­en­er (Liam Nee­son), Russ­ian mys­tic Grig­ori Rasputin (Rhys Ifans), and famed dou­ble agent Mata Hari (Gem­ma Arter­ton).

The stag­ger­ing cast list also col­lects Daniel Brühl, Matthew Goode, Stan­ley Tuc­ci, Aaron Tay­lor-John­son, Tom Hol­lan­der, and Dji­mon Houn­sou to por­tray assort­ed his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. Most curi­ous­ly, in what might be a give­away for a clever run­ning joke, Hol­lan­der appears slat­ed to por­tray England’s King George V, Russ­ian emper­or Nicholas II, and Germany’s kaiser Wil­helm II. Reck­on he’s just got one of those leader-of-men faces.

From the look of the new­ly released trail­er below, this pre­quel will take a more self-seri­ous tone than the lad­dish, row­dy Kings­man films prop­er. One may safe­ly assume that the newest film in the fran­chise will not con­clude with a slow zoom direct­ly into a ter­tiary character’s derrière.

The King’s Man is set for release on 14 Feb­ru­ary, 2020.