Lorraine Broughton (played by Charlize Theron) is the main character in the 2017 Cold War spy film Atomic Blonde, adapted to the screen from the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City. The thriller follows Lorraine as she recounts to her colleagues her attempts to retrieve a list of all of the world’s double agents in Berlin during the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Lorraine as an agent is brilliant and capable, resourceful to a tee not only in multiple fights with others trying to get the list but as well as in the mental spy games that go along with the pursuit— and shows a great sense of fashion all along the way. In the first few minutes, we realize that the list was stolen from the hands of her male lover, another spy who got killed in the exchange. Later in the film, Lorraine gets romantically and professionally involved with a French agent.
The choice to make Lorraine bi was a deliberate one from screenwriter Kurt Johnstad and Theron (who was also an executive producer on the project), changing the French agent from male in the source material to female. Theron has had bi experiences and wanted the film to reflect that, for both verisimilitude and to make the film stand out from other boilerplate spy thrillers. Within the film, Lorraine’s sexuality is accepted and never a point of derision.