In celebration of Nicky and Joe, The Old Guard’s gay superheroes

Netflix’s The Old Guard did twice in one film what the MCU couldn’t in an entire saga: put a gay superhero on the big screen. Nicky and Joe’s romance is the gay love story sorely missing from every major action movie.

It’s been just over a week since Gina Prince-Blythewood’s The Old Guard hit Netflix, and we’re not ashamed to admit that, in that time, we’ve gone from casual fans to full-blown obsessives over it. What’s not to obsess over? It’s a superhero action flick (the first of the summer) starring Charlize Theron as an immortal do-gooder/badass who fights with a battle axe and cracks skulls in the name of justice.

But as much as we love a good Charlize Theron vehicle, it’s not her character, Andy, who we keep coming back to and getting excited about during rewatch after rewatch. No, it’s Luca Marinelli and Marwan Kenzari as Nicky and Joe — the immortal crime-fighting lovers, who we’ve fallen in love with ourselves.

As fun as superhero movies are, when it comes to queer representation, the genre is sorely lacking. Out of the 41 major characters who appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not a single one of them is LGBTQ+, despite the fact that, statistically speaking, at least two of them should be. We’d love to count Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie, but her sexuality is never addressed in-universe. The only queer character in the entire franchise is a laughable blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo from director Joe Russo.

So, if the representation of queer characters is so abysmal in the world’s most popular film franchise, what hope was there for LGBTQ+ folks to see themselves represented onscreen when they go to sit down for another action or superhero flick? Action films are notorious for conforming to gender roles — meaning women in push-up bras and skintight leather catsuits, and men with bulging muscles and deep voices, all being aggressively heterosexual. Although queer superheroes fare much better on television (shows like Legends of Tomorrow are spectacularly diverse), when it comes to the movies, it was virtually impossible to find LGBTQ+ superheroes.

That’s where The Old Guard comes in. We’ll be the first to admit that we hadn’t read the comic before our first viewing of the film, so we were surprised (in the best way possible) to see Joe and Nicky cuddling together in a scene early on in the film when the team is having visions of their newest recruit. We almost couldn’t believe it when the scene first played, but sure enough, as the film progressed it became very clear that Nicky and Joe are very in love — and we were floored.

The fact that Nicky and Joe’s relationship is revolutionary signals that there’s a severe lack of representation in superhero/action flicks, but boy oh boy, is this an amazing place for that representation to start. Nicky and Joe are not only both strong, capable fighters who don’t come anywhere near the stereotypes typically associated with media portrayals of gay men, but they’re also both men who come from different religions, and who have spent over a thousand years in a loving, healthy relationship.

In a media landscape where queer trauma seems to be the only way that so many shows and movies feel they can incorporate their gay characters, it’s incredibly refreshing to see two out and proud men who are in love and whose relationship and faith in each other never falters. Not only that, but Nicky and Joe themselves are both nuanced, well-developed characters with heaps of backstory to be explored in future installments — making them anything but the shallow stereotypes that we’ve come to expect from certain mainstream representations of queerness.

Nicky (formerly Nicolo) is a former priest from Genova who fought for the Christians in the crusades, and Joe (formerly Yusuf) is a Muslim from a merchant family who fought to maintain control of the Holy Land for Islam during the war. However, neither language barriers nor religious ideologies could keep the two of them apart, and as Nicky recounts in the film: “The love of my life was of the people I’d been taught to hate.”

Their epic romance is incredibly heartwarming, not just because of the message of tolerance and love that it spreads, but also because of how clearly in love that Nicky and Joe are. They’re constantly affectionate, whether it’s cuddling on the train, winking at each other over dinner, or even sharing a quiet, tender moment when they’ve been captured and tortured. Nicky and Joe are unafraid to show their love and be intimate, which is why it’s wonderful to see them turn around and kick major ass the second a fight breaks out.

For far too long there’s been a false idea that gay men are “effeminate” or  “weak,” but Nicky and Joe prove that you can be a skilled assassin and still be head over heels in love with your soulmate, making dramatic love proclamations when bigoted guards try to poke fun at you. If you haven’t seen the film, we’re referencing a scene in which Joe monologues about how much Nicky means to him — and we’re not going to lie, we’ve gone back and re-watched that scene a few dozen times ourselves, just because it’s so damn sweet, and Marwan Kenzari’s performance is so amazing.

Although The Old Guard may seem to some like standard superhero action fare, its portrayal of gay men is so far ahead of the rest of its genre contemporaries that we’re crossing our fingers for the next film in the franchise to be greenlit ASAP. We can’t get enough of Nicky and Joe.

Have you seen The Old Guard? Who’s your favorite LGBTQ+ superhero? Sound off in the comments below.