Matthew Vaughn’s spy spoof Kingsman: The Secret Service had a pretty enormous body count, what with all those murderous church rampages and colorfully exploding heads punctuating the jokes like bloody CGI exclamation points. But it’s now looking like at least one presumed-dead character made it out of the movie alive, as Deadline is reporting that Edward Holcroft, who played minor villain Charlie Hesketh in the first film, will be returning for the second.
Holcroft’s character began the movie as a foil to Taran Egerton’s rough-around-the-edges hero, before eventually siding with Samuel L. Jackson and his plan to use evil SIM cards to transform the world’s population into the cast of a global Sam Peckinpah flick. Given that everyone on Team Bad Guy had their craniums popped at the film’s big climax, though, it was easy to assume that Hesketh had died; his just-announced return suggests that Egerton’s victory might have been less than complete. Or, alternatively, it might mean that Hesketh had a twin brother. Or a clone. Or that the second movie takes place in virtual reality. Honestly, we don’t know; it’s kind of hard to predict the plot comings-and-goings of a film that managed to shove Colin Firth, a woman with swords for legs, and anal sex jokes into the same, surprisingly successful package.