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The namesake of Resident Evil’s Leon S. Kennedy has been revealed, and, as many fans suspected, he’s named after director Luc Besson’s 1994 French action film Leon: The Professional.
Resident Evil 2 director Kideki Kamiya recently took to X and casually confirmed the long-held fan theory in response to a fan pointing out the apparent references to the film in Resident Evil. He said Leon’s name came about after talking with Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, who shot down several name ideas before Kamiya offered up another suggestion.
“Well, why don’t we just take it from that movie I watched the other day,” Kamiya said (via Google Translate), that movie being Leon: The Professional, starring Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, and a young Natalie Portman. Kamiya said Mikami said “Yeah, that works,” and the rest is history.
The connections are more than a little obvious. Aside from Leon sharing a name with Leon: The Professional’s hitman main character, the Resident Evil games have long also featured a “Professional” difficulty setting. There’s also the Matilda handgun introduced in Resident Evil 4, thought to be a reference to Portman’s character Mathilda, in the film. Kamiya, however, said the Matilda reference was not his doing, and is
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