‘Kingsman: The Golden Circle’ Director Addresses Film’s Most Controversial Scene

Kim Taylor-Foster
Movies
Movies

Matthew Vaughn isn’t exactly a stranger to controversy. That joke at the end of Kingsman: The Secret Service involving a Swedish princess still provokes intense discussions. And there are a couple of moments in Kingsman: The Golden Circle that refer back to it.

But a scene set at the UK’s most famous music festival, Glastonbury, is the sequel’s most contentious sequence. In it, Taron Egerton’s Eggsy and Agent Whiskey, played by Pedro Pascal, cook up a plan to approach Poppy Delevingne’s character with a tracking device they’ve been tasked with planting on her. Only it doesn’t go on her, it’s designed to go inside her. This involves them competing with one another to see who can convince her to put out.

When Eggsy succeeds in turning on the charm and winning her over, she turns seductress taking the edge off any whiff of forced insertion. She’s still oblivious to Eggsy’s game, however, and clueless about what he’s done — and we see him complete his mission in fairly graphic detail.

Vaughn spoke to FANDOM about the scene.

“Listen, that shot. All that shot is is a close-up of a finger. It’s nothing more, nothing less so imagination is taking over,” he says of the moment Eggsy plants the tracker. “There’s a lot more graphic things on film than that. It’s just an extreme close-up of a finger. And it disappears behind a piece of clothing.”

Vaughn continues, “I know some people have a problem with it but the point of this movie is to push boundaries, it is to make people see things they haven’t seen before. And I think it’s important that I do things that some people love and other people hate, that’s called an experience. If you do something that everyone’s happy with, but not that excited, or not that offended, then you’re bland and boring. And it was very difficult to shoot, I’ll tell you that.”

The shot is followed with a bad-taste internal look at the implanted tracker. Which of course is computer generated, Vaughn assures.

“I became a gynaecologist that day,” the director jokes. “That part, I didn’t shoot that part, that was CG. Even I wouldn’t go that far. That would have been brave of Poppy to do that!”

Kingsman: The Golden Circle hits screens in the UK on September 20 and the US on September 22.

Kim Taylor-Foster
Kim Taylor-Foster is Entertainment Editor for Fandom in the UK. She was raised on an unsteady diet of video nasties and violent action flicks.