Charlize Theron’s ‘Fast & Furious’ Character Getting Her Own Spinoff
The primary baddie of the last two Fast & Furious movies (Fast & Furiouses?) has been Cipher, an evil supergenius computer hacker played by Charlize Theron. She debuted in The Fate of the Furious, turned Vin Diesel’s character heel, and tortured the rest of his crew to her own nefarious ends. Then in F9: The Fast Saga, she returns in a sort of Hannibal Lecter role, spending much of the film advising and/or threatening the John Cena character while imprisoned in a glass box (in red leather pants, because when you’re locked in an inescapable cage, it’s always important to remain fashion forward).
For all her evilness, though, we don’t know a whole lot about Cipher. That could change soon, as the character is reportedly getting her own Fast & Furious film. Per Variety, Vin Diesel “has writers working on a Fast & Furious spinoff for Theron’s character.”
No additional details were provided in the report, and it’s sort of hard to imagine a villain headlining her own film. Then again, the first Fast & Furious spinoff, Hobbs & Shaw, featured two characters who were both introduced to the franchise as villains. Eventually they were given more nuanced motivations and became something closer to antiheroes. So there’s no reason the same couldn’t be done for Cipher. Maybe she has her own reasons for wanting to take over the world’s computer systems and single-handedly destroy our society.
If any actor in that Fast Saga could carry their own movie apart from the rest of the characters it’s Theron. (The same Variety report said she’s also got a sequel to her Netflix thriller The Old Guard in the works.) Still, I can’t help think of one of the alternate definitions for the word “cipher” here: “A person or thing of no importance, especially a person who does the bidding of others and seems to have no will of their own.”