Taron Egerton takes aim in Robin Hood first look

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No mud. No pitchforks. And definitely no “guys in tights running around swashbuckling.” Director Otto Bathurst (Peaky Blinders) knew he would need to lay down a few ground rules if he was going to blow the cobwebs out of Sherwood Forest. But hold on to the hero: “You don’t become a legend for 800 years if you’ve just stolen a few bags of money from rich people to give to the poor,” Bathurst told EW on the Budapest set in April. “In my mind, Robin Hood was this sort of seriously militarized anarchist revolutionary, a freedom thinker and a truth seeker. And the more I got into the story, it just became startling how utterly relevant it is to what’s going on in society now.”

His Robin, 28-year-old Taron Egerton, agrees: “I was approached not long after the first Kingsman movie had come out, and my initial response, to be totally honest, was ‘Why?’ [But] Otto told me he wanted to do something entirely revisionist, something that can’t be tied down to a medieval universe. The first act of the movie, these scenes crusading in Syria, were written like something from The Hurt Locker. It was fantastic, and that was enough to convince me.” Also on board: Merry Men Jamie Foxx (Little John) and Jamie Dornan (Will Scarlett), and The Knick‘s Eve Hewson as Maid Marian. And Ben Mendelsohn steps into the Sheriff of Nottingham’s boots — a role that for many is still defined by the late Alan Rickman in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. “I ain’t gonna be outdoing him,” he admits. “That performance is a delightful tour de force, and I knew and loved the man. But I get a kick out of [sharing it], and I think he would have too.”

Foxx, for one, is already a Mendelsohn superfan: “He’s venomous. So good. There are some people that can just whup your ass. Him, Samuel Jackson, Viola Davis: ass whuppers.” And he says he too felt galvanized by Bathurst’s vision, freed from the constraints of period-perfect accents, costumes, and soundtrack cues. “I wanted to be part of it because it’s hood, not Robin Hood. He’s making it new and interesting, and it gives it weight.” Though one early promise might have been broken, Egerton admits with a laugh: “I did initially say the only thing I wouldn’t do was wear tights, and the pants did sort of get tighter and tighter… Let’s just call them jeggings now.”