Character page for Atomic Blonde.
Spoilers are unmarked.
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Lorraine
Lorraine Broughton
Played by: Charlize Theron
A top-level MI6 field agent who's sent to Berlin to find a list of double agents that is being smuggled into the West on the eve of the collapse of the Wall.
- Action Girl: To put it simply, she kicks a lot of ass.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Her heterosexual affair with a male French agent in the graphic novel is turned into a same-sex romance in the film.
- Anti-Hero: She's a morally ambiguous, ruthless assassin, and is revealed to be a triple agent for the Americans playing the Soviets and the British against each other, but she takes protecting people on her missions seriously and the only people she kills onscreen are cold-blooded murderers themselves, making her A Lighter Shade of Black next to the actual villains.
- Badass Longcoat: She's practically never seen without one. Justified due to the film's chilly Berlin in November setting. This actually becomes something of a Plot Device All Along when it turns out Percival slipped a bug into one of Lorraine's most used coats to spy on her.
- The Bait: She eventually pieces together that she was sent to Berlin by MI6 in part to determine Percival's loyalty.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted in Lorraine's case. She takes some severe hits to the face during the stairwell fight and spends a significant amount of time with her entire face bruised and bloodied and one hell of a black eye. In the movie's epilogue in Paris, Lorraine wears a sleeveless jumpsuit; you don't have to look very closely to see a trail of still-healing bruises down her upper arm.
- Bruiser with a Soft Center: She's tough-as-nails (it's a requirement to survive in her profession), but she's also capable of being a caring lover as seen with Delphine.
- Combat Stilettos: She's practically never seen out of them, and does all of her fighting in them. At one point right after arriving in Berlin she takes her heel off to use the stiletto as an Improvised Weapon against a KGB agent in a more pragmatic version of this trope.
- Deadpan Snarker: When Lorraine's not being deadly serious, she's this.
- Distaff Counterpart: She has something of a rival in the unnamed KGB agent (credited as "Soldier") with the same style of indestructability, bleach blonde hair, and monochromatic fashion that she keeps running into.
- Drink-Based Characterization: She drinks Stoli vodka on the rocks like it was water fitting her cold no-fuss demeanor.
- Femme Fatale Spy: She indulges Delphine to use her for information in return.
Percival
David Percival
Played by: James McAvoy
Dubbed by: Alexis Victor (European French)
A maverick MI6 Berlin station chief who is assigned to assist Lorraine in her mission.
- Badass Longcoat: He wears a Volkspolizei (East Germany's People's police) longcoat for a while that he stole after beating one up during an escape. He wasn't interested in the cap, on the other hand.
- Best Friend: Was this to James Gascoigne.
- Combat Pragmatist: Somewhat deconstructed: while he's great at ambushes, he's not much in a straight fight, unlike Lorraine who can brawl with the best of them in addition to being underhanded. Best seen when he attacks Delphine — he has the advantage of surprise at first, but as soon as she gets a hit in he nearly collapses in pain and is only able to succeed because she let her guard down again. He never fights Lorraine in person because he knows he'll lose.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: He is constantly sliding between gross incompetence (or feigns it) and savant-like brilliance in the spy craft.
- Dressing as the Enemy: He steals a Volkspolizei officer's coat and hat in the beginning, and keeps the coat. He gets a full Volkspolizei uniform later on. He gets a version with an ushanka later on.
- Drink-Based Characterization: He's wilder than Lorraine and swigs Jack Daniels whiskey out of the bottle.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: He is introduced (to Lorraine, not the audience) with a boyish, medium-length haircut in his MI6 file photo. When she meets him in Berlin, he's got a buzzcut and a beard.
- Going Native: He settled in East Berlin among the local punk communities and, suffice to say, integrated quite well there.
- Obfuscating Disability: He wears a cast on an uninjured arm so people underestimate him as a physical threat. He also uses it to hide a shiv.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: He's far more intelligent than he lets appear in order to lower everyone's guard and hide his true nature.
Delphine
Delphine Lassalle
Played by: Sofia Boutella
An undercover French agent in Berlin.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Played extremely straight, her lingerie-clad corpse doesn't have so much as a cut on her throat from where she is garrotted.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous: She gets strangled to death in nothing but lingerie.
- Femme Fatale Spy: She seduces Lorraine for information, and Lorraine indulges her to use her for information in return.
Bremovych
Aleksander Bremovych
Played by: Roland Møller
The main antagonist, a high-ranking KGB operative in Germany.
- Big Bad: The main enemy Lorraine is up against.
- Dirty Communists: Seems to believe in communism, and he's cruel and very ruthless.
- Establishing Character Moment: Humiliating an East Berlin punk about his music and dance tastes, then beating him to death with his own skateboard in front of his friends and smashing his boombox to pieces.
- Faux Affably Evil: Occasionally tries to be smooth and charming, but the violent brute is never far below the surface.
- Hidden Depths: It's easy to mistake Bremovych for a stupid thug. It's also potentially fatal. He manages to surprise both Percival and Lorraine by knowing more than they expect him to know, and it's only because they're so good themselves that they're able to (respectively) talk or fight their way out of the situation.
Kurzfeld
Emmett Kurzfeld
Played by: John Goodman
Dubbed by: Jacques Frantz (European French)
A senior CIA agent working with MI6.
- Da Chief: Lorraine's true boss, who has his own opinions on her.
- Not So Stoic: He's mostly emotionless, but still reacts to being called a "cocksucker" by Lorraine. Their final dialogue reveals that he genuinely didn't expect that.
- We Do Not Know Each Other: His visit to MI6 in London to interrogate Lorraine has him pretend he doesn't know her while he actually does. MI6 is completely unaware that Lorraine is actually a Double Agent working for the CIA.
Spyglass
Spyglass
Played by: Eddie Marsan
A Stasi defector who knows the list by heart and initially gave it to Gascoigne. Lorraine is tasked with protecting him.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": He is only ever referred to as "Spyglass".
- Living MacGuffin: Knowing the names on the list makes him both valuable and a target for elimination.
- Morality Pet: Has a wife and daughter.
- Non-Action Guy: Not a fighter at all. His main contributions in one fight are smashing a bottle on someone's head and staying out of Lorraine's way.
- Photographic Memory: Was able to memorize it in its entirety in only a day or two.
- Token Good Teammate: While most everyone in the film is a jaded jackass, Spyglass is essentially an ordinary citizen with a pleasant demeanor and selfless motives.
- Well he worked for the East German secret police, so he can't have been that nice. It's just that we never see him do anything unpleasant on screen.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Perhaps not surprisingly.
- Turncoat: Is trying to emigrate to West Berlin with his family.
Gascoigne
James Gascoigne
Played by: Sam Hargrave
An MI6 agent in Berlin who found a list of all the agents and double agents of the West, and the lover of Lorraine. He is killed by Yuri Bakhtin at the beginning of the film, who then takes the list, which causes Lorraine to be sent to Berlin.
- Best Friend: Was this to David Percival.
- Die Laughing: He is immensely amused by the fact his death is at the hands of the runt of the KGB litter.
- He Knows Too Much: He found the list of spies, and gets killed by Bakhtin for it, and the latter steals the list.
- The Lost Lenore: To Lorraine.
- Plot-Triggering Death: His death (and the subsequent agents list theft) causes Lorraine to be sent to Berlin.
