Bourne Again: 10 Characters We Need To See Back In The Next Bourne Movie

The Bourne movies have given audiences so many unforgettable moments and characters over the years. From relatively small beginnings to unbelievable blockbuster finales, the casts and the writing have remained at a really high standard.

Many fan favorites have sadly failed to make it in the deadly world of Bourne but there’s a few who we never see die with our own eyes and they have a lot more left to give. Information on what direction the future of the Bourne franchise will go in is still shaky but, when they do get around to the next movie, we’ve got a lot of characters we need to see again. Here’s our picks for the top ten characters we need to see in the next Bourne movie.

10 Research Tech #1

A character so unassuming that he doesn’t even have a name. He technically doesn’t even have a number, he’s just the first Research Tech character to be listed in the credits. Research Tech #1 is one of the main assistants to Treadstone manager Conklin in the first Bourne movie. So there’s some shared history that takes us all the way back to the beginning. But the real reason we need to see him back is because of who plays him.

Research Tech #1 is played by Walton Goggins, who TV fans will forever remember as Shane Vendrell and Boyd Crowder from FX’s The Shield and Justified, respectively. But he’s been making deservedly big waves in the movie world for some time. Tarantino finally gave him the role he deserved as the despicable Chris Mannix in The Hateful Eight. But he might be best known these days as the colorful villain Sonny Burch from Ant-Man and The Wasp. With all of those legendary bad guy credits, it’d be insane not to ask him back for a bigger part next time.

9 Martin Kreutz

The brother of Maria Kreutz, Jason Bourne’s romantic interest in the first two movies and arguably the love of his life, Martin Kreitz only appears for one scene at the beginning of The Bourne Ultimatum. He’s another example of a character with not just a wealth of personal history with Bourne to be exploited but also a wealth of unseen acting potential.

Martin is played by acclaimed actor Daniel Brühl and, while he has some top credentials in villain roles, he could provide the basis for a friendship, or an emotional center, never really seen before in a Bourne movie. Their interaction is cold and brief in Ultimatum – Bourne is doing the courtesy of telling him his sister is dead and that he killed her assassin – but their shared grief could unlock so much more to Matt Damon’s dramatic side.

8 Paz

Paz is one of the latter day Blackbriar assets who appears as Bourne’s main nemesis in Ultimatum. What sets Paz apart from the regular array of stone-faced killers that the hero has to square off against in the movies is that, firstly, he survives the events of his movie and his deathmatch with Bourne. Secondly, he’s actually the only adversary to ever outsmart Bourne.

Paz is played by Venezuelan actor Édgar Ramírez, who not only proved his action chops in The Bourne Ultimatum but a slew of movies since then. Paz also has an interesting connection to Bourne in that Bourne spares his life at the end of the movie and Paz returns the favor. The assets are very often tied up as loose ends by their CIA handlers. But, as mentioned earlier, Paz is more wily than the average Bourne asset. If Bourne could evade them then so could he.

7 Aaron Kalloor

Played by Riz Ahmed in the most recent movie, Jason Bourne, Aaron Kalloor is the Mark Zuckerberg-esque head of a fictional tech company named Deep Dream. The company lies at the center of that movie’s conspiracy involving topical concerns about data privacy and modern government surveillance. Aaron also lies at the heart of the movie’s big assassination attempt.

Throughout the movie, he’s at odds with the nefarious CIA director Dewey (played by Tommy Lee Jones). After butting heads and trying to go public with the unscrupulous work he’d been doing with the CIA, Dewey tries to have Kalloor killed but Bourne thwarts the plan at the last minute. With Dewey replaced by a closer associate of Kalloor, and the next entry on our list, he could have a big part in the future of the franchise’s story.

6 Heather Lee

Played by Alicia Vikander, Heather Lee is another relatively new addition to the Bourne world but a very big one. She starts out as the head of cybersecurity operations at the CIA and, by the end of the movie, she’s maneuvered, and murdered, her way to pretty much a guaranteed position as the next CIA director. That’s pretty solid career climbing for a few days work.

Cunning and absolutely cutthroat, she appears at first to be a tentative ally to Bourne, but the two set up the basis for a fairly sustainable rivalry by the end of the movie. Primary Bourne antagonists are famed for their love of orchestrating their plans from a control room far away and nobody does that as well as Heather. With her knowledge, she can navigate snipers through war zones and shut down power grids from halfway around the world. Bourne could finally meet his match in her.

5 Outcome #3

Another unnamed, and only briefly-appearing, character. Outcome #3 is, again, appealing for his shared history with a main hero but mostly for how he’s played and who plays him. The actor behind Outcome #3 is none other than Oscar Isaac and any franchise, from X-Men to Star Wars, can always do with a little more Oscar Isaac.

Outcome #3 appears at the beginning of The Bourne Legacy as one of the many assets from the many programs established throughout the movies. He’s stuck in a remote Alaskan cabin with the movie’s hero, Aaron Cross (we’ll get to Aaron later), and, after some intense conversation, it’s revealed that he’s there for going rogue over a woman. In strict fairness, it’s implied that he died during a drone strike meant for the two of them but the audience never actually sees it. With all the potential there for story and acting, it’d be such a waste to not let him miraculously escape like Aaron does.

4 Pam Landy

Probably Bourne’s most powerful, and most consistent, ally throughout the movies. Pam Landy starts off in The Bourne Supremacy hunting down Bourne after he’d been framed for murder but she quickly gets clued in on the cover-up going on around her and she ends up helping Bourne get to America. In turn, he hands Pam a set of documents proving the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of US citizens as part of a brutal program conducted in the name of counter-terrorism.

Pam gets the documents out to the world at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, and it looks like she’s bested the movie’s big bad (the next entry on our list). But, in The Bourne Legacy, it’s revealed that the tables get flipped by the spin doctors behind the assassination programs and she might be the one in hot water after they manage to round up and discredit all of the leaked information. We hope you’re okay, Pam, and we hope to see you back kicking butt soon.

3 Noah Vosen

The main villain of The Bourne Ultimatum and the man holding the leash of Paz and all the other assets in the movie, Deputy Director Noah Vosen heads up the movie’s sinister counter-terrorism unit in New York. As mentioned, he’s a slippery one. He’s conniving and he shows no hesitation in ordering the execution of anybody who’s a threat to him. He clearly gets off on the power he has and it makes him a great villain.

After shooting Jason Bourne at the end of The Bourne Ultimatum, the audience last sees him walking free from his crimes during the overlapping events of The Bourne Legacy. If Pam Landy is coming back then they have to bring back Vosen too. Bourne isn’t the only person who has unfinished business with him and we’re itching to see him get his comeuppance.

2 Aaron Cross

Matt Damon’s replacement in the Bourne franchise during his one movie absence, Aaron may not have the magician-like genius of Jason Bourne but he holds his own. He’s also shown to be a much more down-to-earth character – partially, no doubt, due to his lack of amnesia. Played by the lovable Jeremy Renner, Aaron’s a much easier character to have fun with and fun is one of the things that the Bourne movies are always struggling to get more of.

Part of a much later offshoot of Treadstone, Aaron’s character delves much more into the scientific side of things that are only hinted at in other Bourne movies. He’s genetically altered by experimentation to be stronger and smarter. His backstory, as a low IQ soldier who desperately wanted more out of life, gives him a more emotionally relatable reasoning than Bourne who can often-times seem too cold. Pairing him and the equally rebellious Bourne together could result in all kinds of mischief.

1 Eric Byer

The man in the chair of The Bourne Legacy, so to speak, and the relatively-unseen driving force behind everything that happens in the Bourne movies, Eric Byer is one tough man to outthink. Not only does he manage all of the assassin programs in the Bourne movies for years, from the ground up, he manages all of the secrets too. He knows where every body is buried and he probably buried a few of them himself.

Byer is a world-beating bad guy, a pure pragmatist that feels no remorse and no indecision in his ruthless actions. Though he never appears in a Matt Damon Bourne movie, he does have a lot of direct history with Aaron Cross and the pair never get to face off mano a mano. If the CIA had to deal with Bourne and Cross at the same time then he’s the only candidate for even having a hope of beating them. He’s played to perfection in The Bourne Legacy by Edward Norton, so the prospect of the star power alone is positively mouthwatering.

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