Theo James and Daniel Ings have the kind of brotherly bond you would expect to have emerged after six months spent portraying siblings in Guy Ritchie’s eight-part Netflix series, The Gentlemen.
A spin-off from Ritchie’s 2019 crime thriller of the same name, the new series expands on that world with an entirely new cast headed by James and Ings’ Horniman brothers and Kaya Scodelario’s feisty drug boss, Susie Glass.
The action dramedy sees James’ Eddie Horniman unexpectedly inherit his father’s sizable country estate – only to discover that it is part of a cannabis empire. Moreover, a host of unsavory characters from Britain’s criminal underworld want a piece of the operation. To complicate matters, Eddie is not the eldest Horniman and must contend with the bitter disappointment of his elder brother Freddy who had presumed to inherit his father’s home – and the title and money that goes with it.
Clearly their late father was onto something, given how Eddie – now known as The Duke – is a sensible ex-army officer and Freddy is a cocaine fiend and party animal struggling under the weight of debt, hence his nickname, The Liability.
“That relationship was imperative to us because it sets up the stakes in the first episode,” James [above] tells us about how they built out their familial bond beyond their roles. “Daniel and I talked about this a lot, how we wanted them to have a real relationship – within the kind of heightened world of Guy Ritchie – that they do love each other clearly, but they also hate each other and there’s the guilt and the shame and the competition.
“That was rich for us, and we wanted to mine that as much as possible. And it’s a fun dynamic because – if you have siblings – I think we’ve all been there in some way. And there’s always those continuous shifting rivalries between siblings which is such fertile ground,” suggests the actor best known for the Divergent franchise.
Ings [left] agrees. “Even with friends, it’s the same thing – almost anyone can think of that person where you love them, you idolise them. And for Eddie, it’s like Freddy’s his older brother. That kind of does mean something when he was a little boy he’s going to have looked up to this guy. So, I think they both sort of idolise each other. But that can often be the thing of like, ‘I want what I don’t have; I want the thing that you have that I don’t’.
“And because this is not a movie and we’re stretching it out over eight episodes, you’ve got to have a bit of a runway and give these characters somewhere to go. You have to be able to invest in the characters. And such a big part of the show – for both Susie and Eddie – is really that this would be a lot easier if they just end off the Horniman family and particularly Freddy – the whole thing would just be fine. There wouldn’t be a problem. So, to sort of motivate everything that they do and all of the danger that they find, you have to be able to buy into the kind of relatable human story, the heart of it,” says Ings, known for his TV roles in Instinct, Lovesick, The Crown and Sex Education.
When we ask how they stand in their respective family pecking orders, James laughs. “I am one of five siblings. And I’m the youngest. I would say that, especially now we’re a bit more aged. At least Dan and I are, you reflect on family and you take turns in, ‘Who’s the Freddy?’ Like, who’s the fuck-up of the family? And with the five of us, we’ve gone through the gamut of ‘Which one is the fuck up?’ Currently it’s me.”
Though it might be difficult to see James as any kind of screw up, Ings knows exactly what he means, also being the youngest in his family.
“I do have a funny family. We’re all pretty fucking weird. I mean, families are just weird, aren’t they?”
Everybody was excited to not only be part of Ritchie’s world – including working with his long-time collaborators Ray Winstone and Vinnie Jones – but also with the likes of Joely Richardson and Michael Vu.
“I liked the central conceit, which was something that I felt was very Guy Ritchie, but also something he hadn’t done before, which was the aristocratic element, the old world, the crumbling facade of British Empire and everything that that means – versus the underbelly of this quite suave criminal empire and the smashing of those two genres together,” says James.
“And, I also loved the very British humour – very sardonic, wild and lots of tea drinking.”
For Scodelario [above], she was interested in portraying a strong woman in the middle of this world. “The idea of seeing a female character in this universe and being a little bit more front and centre than maybe we’re used to within the Guy Ritchie scope… And not only that, but she’s also a grown up when we meet her. She’s a woman who is already at the top of the game. She’s intelligent. She knows what she wants. She knows what she’s doing. She’s a master manipulator, but she’s also interesting and has her vulnerabilities and has her Achilles heels. I just loved the idea of playing someone who doesn’t need to prove herself to anybody in the room. It’s quite rare, I think, to meet a female character who’s already there,” she says.
If some have likened the universe of The Gentlemen to a kind of Anglified Breaking Bad, then the casting of Giancarlo Esposito – portraying Gus Fring in both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul – as a drug money-man nods at that.
Certainly, writer/creator/director Ritchie had no problem in stretching out the premise of his original film into an eight-part series and already there are rumours of a second series. “If anything, I had too much material to work with rather than too little,” he says. “There was such a deluge of characters and narratives in my head, that squeezing them all in was always going to be the real problem.”
Drug king-pins, flashy criminals and clashing motivations are Ritchie’s bread-and-butter. “The Gentlemen is the story of Eddie Horniman, an army officer, who returns from active service abroad to be at his father’s deathbed. At the reading of the will, Eddie discovers his father, The Duke of Halstead has disinherited the elder son, Freddy, leaving the estate and title to himself, ‘the spare’.
“Then he has to navigate not just having usurped his brother, who happens to have a big drug and gambling problem, but also problems that come from discovering his father had gone into business with a cannabis cartel who run an underground weed farm on the estate,” explains Ritchie.
“He wants to extract himself from the exotic frequency of this particular business, but then Freddy reveals he owes a huge financial debt to the wrong kind of people and helping him out of it will mean striking deals with the same criminal underworld that he’s trying to escape.
“But then, the more he gets involved in criminality, the more he finds himself beguiled by it. So, let’s just say there are going to be some far reaching consequences to helping his brother out,” he teases.
For James, he sees his character’s journey as a comment on the British establishment. “I think part of that commentary is that old money, aristocracy, indentured wealth is what is the backbone of British culture and class system, and for all its major problems, it still influences a large part of our cultural understanding.
“We used to think that power existed in those places, and they certainly did. But the idea of the show is that that’s a crumbling facade and where the real power is now – is from the working class; the folk who build a legacy from nothing rather than having things given to you on a plate,” he says.
The Gentlemen is streaming now.
Source link
#Lady #Gentlemen #FilmInk