The Woman King found something radical not in its history, but in the history of its genre

Gina Prince-Bythewood's epic offered up an ensemble of Black women and old-fashioned earnestness for a totally original blockbuster.

By Caroline Siede | August 18, 2025 | 3:00pm

Photo: Sony

Film Features women of action

The Woman King found something radical not in its history, but in the history of its genre

With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.

Forget stunts and pyro, the hardest thing to pull off in an action move is earnestness. It’s a genre of quippy one-liners, sarcastic heroes, cynical plot twists, and questionable morals. The films that break that pattern stand out because they’re so few and far between. These are films like Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger, and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King—the 2022 historical epic that asked why Viola Davis couldn’t have Tom Cruise’s career.

Most Popular

That earnestness surprised a lot of critics, who were expecting a more highbrow history lesson about the Agojie, a group of highly trained female warriors in the West African kingdom of Dahomey. But it was no surprise for those steeped in Prince-Bythewood’s work. The college-athlete-turned-director began her career bringing old-fashioned earnestness to romantic dramas like Love & Basketball and Beyond The Lights before expanding to the action genre with her sneakily great adaptation of The Old Guard. Prince-Bythewood’s specialty is putting Black women at the center of classic genres that haven’t always made space for them.

In a lot of ways, The Woman King is an example of why “representation matters”—a trite but true rallying cry of the 2010s. The Woman King actually first began as an idea from actor Maria Bello, of all people, who learned about the Agojie on a 2015 trip to Benin and thought it would make a great idea for a movie. She spent years pitching the project around Hollywood, occasionally getting offered a small $5 million budget by a studio, but mostly getting told that the idea was too unprofitable to work. Then the one-two punch of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman in 2017 and Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster Black Panther in 2018 turned Hollywood’s calculus on its head. Suddenly the real-life story of the “Dahomey Amazons” who inspired Black Panther‘s Dora Milaje was a red-hot prospect. Sony TriStar greenlit the film with a $50 million budget. It opened to glowing reviews and went on to gross $97.6 million. “Representation matters” in the sense that the success of Black Panther literally got The Woman King made, and also in the sense that The Woman King gave an ensemble of Black women the spotlight in a way the action genre never really had before.

It’s worth acknowledging that the actual history in The Woman King is largely fictionalized. Though the film depicts the Agojie as purely heroic figures who fought to end Dahomey’s limited practice of slavery, in real-life Dahomey had a much bigger role in the Atlantic slave trade and the Agojie sometimes led raids to acquire those slaves. This was enough to spark a bit of controversy when the film was released—and to get original star Lupita Nyong’o to leave the project because she was uncomfortable with “the tribe’s legacy of violence.” (The Underground Railroad star Thuso Mbedu stepped into her role instead.)

But, to me at least, the historical simplification is on par with what I expect from a glossy Hollywood action epic. The Woman King is entertainment-first spectacle, with a message designed to speak more to our current moment than to accurately reflect the past. Even its relatively bloodless approach to PG-13 violence marks it as a movie not especially grounded in reality. Where it feels revolutionary is not how it engages with early 19th-century history, but how it engages with the history of the action genre.

Since women-led action movies first evolved from the rape-revenge genre in the 1970s, Hollywood has loved stories of women who experience a trauma that drives them to become badass avengers. From Kill Bill to Terminator 2 to Red Sonja to most of Pam Grier‘s early Blaxploitation films, it’s one of the most common story archetypes out there. What’s remarkable about The Woman King is how it manages to acknowledge the physical and sexual traumas that so many women experience without using it as motivation for its characters’ heroism—a subtle but meaningful storytelling shift.

When we meet Viola Davis’ General Nanisca, she’s a fearless warrior dedicated to liberating captives and pushing for King Ghezo (John Boyega) to end Dahomey’s ties to European exploitation. She’s also, as we’ll later learn, a woman who, early into her time with the Agojie was kidnapped, repeatedly raped, and bore a child she gave away. It’s an experience that haunts and shapes her, but not the sole thing that drives her, which is an important distinction. While Nanisca does wind up getting revenge on her rapist, her arc is about making internal peace with herself—about coming to realize she doesn’t have to lock away her memories of the past to have a future as a powerful leader.

It’s one of many places in which you can tell that The Woman King is a movie written, directed, and produced by women interested in the actual nuances of women’s lives, not just the action tropes they can fill. The 135-minute film tracks at least seven major interpersonal dynamics between its main female cast, on top of giving Nanisca and new recruit Nawi (Mbedu) male characters to interact with as well. It’s hard to think of any other action movie that does that; even something like Wonder Woman used its Amazons more as set dressing than as characters.

Here, there’s a whole cast of women who pop as individuals, from Sheila Atim’s quietly dignified advisor Amenza to Adrienne Warren’s competitive new recruit Ode to Lashana Lynch’s scene-stealing Izogie, the playfully charismatic, impossibly tough trainer who gets a new class of Agojie-hopefuls in shape. Where a traditional action movie might make space for one or two of those archetypes, here the bench is endless. And each of the women is allowed to be more than one thing—warm in their friendships, funny in their off-hours, ferocious in battle. Yet the ensemble never feels overstuffed because the characters are so firmly united in the greater purpose of being an Agojie; of leaving their individual pasts behind to find a greater calling.

“What was normal to me growing up was women who went after it, who were aggressive, who had that mentality of wanting to be the best,” Prince-Bythewood explained to The Hollywood Reporter in 2022. “To outwork everybody, to leave everything out on the floor. Those lessons were normal to me. And then, as I got older, it was fascinating when I started to learn how few women had that. I truly believe that everyone has this innate athlete, innate warrior within them.”

She wanted to capture that feeling on film and decided she needed her cast to be able to handle the action to do it. “I knew I needed them to do their own fighting stunts,” Prince-Bythewood said. “Because it’s the best way to shoot action, action should be story-driven and character-driven, and to do that, you need performance. And if you’re cutting around stunt doubles to do it, it’s very hard to get that. But also, being an athlete myself, I knew they needed to feel what it feels like to train at that level, fight and be in their body, and trust and respect their body.”

The cast trained six days a week for four months before shooting began. They’d lift weights for 90 minutes in the morning then come back for three-and-a-half hours of fight training with stunt coordinator Danny Hernandez in the afternoon. Prince-Bythewood often trained alongside them, channeling her background in track, basketball, and boxing into the athleticism she wanted to capture in the project. For her part, Davis developed the ability to run a 6:23 mile and found a new connection with her body in the process.

“I was a tough kid, I always wanted to kick somebody’s ass,” Davis explained. “But as I grew into an adult, I embraced the narrative of the world about women. Which is, I’m feeling guilty that I don’t smile enough, I’m not soft enough, I’m not small enough, I’m too aggressive, everybody’s afraid of me. All these adjectives that I’ve been running from all my life that I feel de-feminize me. All of a sudden I had to call in all of those things that I threw into a wastebasket to create this Nanisca. And somewhere in the middle of that, it just happened: I felt badass. I felt proud, even, of my body, and not that it looked like anything that anybody else would find acceptable, but for me, it just was the house of my bravery.”

The toughness that Davis found in her physicality makes the film’s ultimate sentimentality all the more earned. The Woman King is filled with impressive fight sequences where the oiled-up Agojie lay waste to their enemies. But at its heart, it’s a mother-daughter story in which Nanisca slowly comes to realize that Nawi is the baby she gave up all those years ago. For Prince-Bythewood, the through-line was a chance to work through her own experience as an adoptee. Her own attempt to reconnect with her biological mom went poorly, and in The Woman King she got to give Nanisca and Nawi a happier, more cathartic reunion—one in which they realize that their emotional bonds make them stronger, not weaker.

Again, it’s the sort of thing you don’t realize the action landscape is missing until you see it. While motherhood is a fairly common theme in women-led action movies, it’s rarely explored like this, between two fully developed warrior characters with independent arcs of their own. Yet how many historical epics have centered on stories of noble sons trying to live up to their father’s legacies? How much have we been trained to appreciate the fierce fighting spirit of fathers and sons in a way we haven’t between mothers and daughters?

While trying to get The Woman King made, Prince-Bythewood felt that Hollywood’s attitude was, “You can’t make a historical epic about anything other than what we’ve seen a hundred times before.” Yet her film is proof that if you shift the lens just slightly, you can revitalize well-worn tropes all over again. The Woman King‘s crowdpleasing, almost corny tone is as old-fashioned as they come. But a new setting and new characters make it all feel completely fresh.

If a traditional historical epic keeps women on the margins, a traditional woman-led action movie takes it as a given that we’re following the woman at its center because she’s exceptional—because she defies the inherent limitations of her gender; because she’s “not like other girls.” In The Woman King, however, Prince-Bythewood argues that being like other girls is the best thing you can be. That with training, drive, conviction, mentorship, and sisterhood, any woman can become the hero of her own story. It’s a radical message inside a Hollywood throwback.

Next time: We celebrate one year of Women Of Action with a deep dive into Ellen Ripley and the legacy of Alien.