In Netflix’s The Old Guard movie, Charlize Theron’s Andy states multiple times that she’s old, though she doesn’t remember how old exactly – but she could be lying. Based on the comic series of the same name, The Old Guard follows a group of four – later five – immortals who are being hunted by mercenaries so a pharmaceutical company can capture and experiment on them. The goal, of course, is to discover the secrets to their immortality and harness it so the world could be rid of all disease and suffering.
Copley blinds himself to the harsh reality of what he’s doing by thinking this way, which is why he partners with Booker, the youngest of the immortals, who also wants to see disease eradicated. But they need Andy to do that – or so they thought, at least. Andy is the eldest and has been around for thousands of years, so she’s the key to their end-goal. And when Freeman joins the team as the new youngest immortal, she repeatedly asks Andy the obvious question: how old she really is.
In The Old Guard movie, Andy never reveals her actual age, always saying she’s forgotten because so much time has passed. Even in a candid conversation with Freeman about their families, Andy admits she doesn’t remember what her mother or sisters looked like; she needs to use her imagination instead. However, in The Old Guard comics, Andy does reveal at one point that she’s 6,732 years old. That puts her being born in the fifth millennium BC, a time when calendars were first created.
While it’s difficult to pinpoint what happened exactly during that time period, there’s no denying that it was before the Egyptian pyramids were erected and most civilizations were formed. It was nearing the end of the Neolithic era in China and humans were just beginning to advance in Europe. All of this means that Andy, and she so aptly puts it in the movie, is old. She’s seen empires rise and fall, countless wars, and religions come and go. When she was born, mythological figures were still dominant, which could be why she, too, became a “god” at one point. She could’ve been considered the Greek mythological figure Andromache of Troy.
Since there’s not much Andy remembers about her early life, The Old Guard movie – and comic, for that matter – mostly show her with other immortals, many of whom didn’t arrive until thousands of years later. To live for so long, it’s understandable that Andy would become jaded in her mission, which is why Copley is there to guide her along on a new one, though this time she’ll need to do even more to survive given that she’s lost her immortality, seemingly for good.
