In the first episode of Gangs of London, Sopé Dìrísù’s character Elliot finds himself in a bar at the mercy of a gang of thugs – or so it seems. In a flash, Elliot dispatches his foes in a balletic display of violence that was unlike anything British television had ever seen before.
The series immediately became Sky’s second-biggest original drama launch of all time, with 2.2 million viewers watching the opening episode alone. The ensuing popularity of the show meant the anticipation for the second series, which is about to land on Sky Atlantic and NOW, rocketed sky high. Which meant the new showrunner Corin Hardy had quite a job on his hands.
Brought in to direct four episodes of the previous season including the last, Hardy – whose background is in horror films – is now bringing his own flavour of wackiness to the slick, glossy, smash hit story of London’s international crime gangs. These run from the Wallaces, who head up a criminal empire alongside the Dumani family, to rival Pakistani and Kurdish heroin distributors, Welsh travellers, as well as the Albanian and Nigerian mafias.
“I was so ingrained in the story and the characters by the end of season one, I’d already had a number of thoughts and ideas written down in books, almost like as a fan, what would be cool to happen next,” he says. “Someone said, ‘We built the sandpit for season one, and now you can play in it.’ And that was a good metaphor for me.”
Season two picks up a year on, and London’s crime gangs are still reeling from the events of the finale. Head of the firm Sean Wallace (played by Joe Cole) is dead, his mother Marian (Michelle Fairley) has been shot by her late husband’s right-hand man Ed Dumani (Lucian Msmati) and Elliot has fallen under the bloody sway of the Investors, the shadowy puppet-masters financing the gangs.
Viewers may be more likely to expect a gangster show with production values this high to be set in America rather than London. But, as Hardy says, the setting is one that lends itself rather well to a gangster aesthetic. “We want to make sure we were reflecting an inclusive world view of London, which is to say, it feels accurate, but it’s also very cinematic,” he says.
“So it is a sort of multicultural mix: it feels like a real London but you’ll notice we never really see any landmarks of London. We changed the skyline slightly. We examine it, almost like if you lifted up a rock and look underneath – so you can go through a back door and down some steps and suddenly you’re in a different kind of space.”
Not for him the London of Paddington films and Notting Hill: this London, he says, is a heightened, “Gothamised” version of the original, where the audience can believe that shoot-outs happen in the middle of the street. Many of the actors in the show tell me that the London portrayed in the series is almost a character in itself: gritty, surprising, full of secrets.
The same label could be applied to the lead character. Dìrísù, a Londoner himself, made waves in his first outing as Elliot, an undercover police officer – from that initial pub scene to the series finale, where he brutally kills his ‘employer’ Sean Wallace at the behest of the Investors.
But the second season feels markedly different to the first, he says. “I think [Hardy has] really put his stamp on the show. I would be interested to see how the audience feel about it. Can they feel the change? Or is it seamless? Because there was definitely a change for us shooting it.”
One of the biggest changes for Dìrísù was in his character’s arc. Though Elliot wrestled with his inner demons over the course of season one, season two is set to see him go down an ever darker path – something Dìrísù was not entirely comfortable with.
“I was arguing for us,” he says of him and the character. “Like, ‘What are you doing to Elliot? This is my friend.’ You have to have a lot of empathy for your character to portray them honestly, and there were moments where I was just like, ‘Bro, what are you doing?’
“I couldn’t find a rationale for it. Even for me playing the character, which meant he’d gone to a place that I wasn’t able to access him. And that’s not a criticism. It’s just - when you get to it, you’ll understand how dark he gets over the course of the series.”
However murky the series itself gets, that feeling is entirely absent from the cast’s interactions with each other. Despite Lucian Msamati and Orli Shuka playing two of the series’ biggest rival gangsters – family head Ed Dumani and Albianian mafioso Luan – the pair regularly explode into fits of giggles when discussing series two.
After the shocking events of season one, it looks like the Dumanis (Ed and his son Alex, played by Paapa Essiedu) have usurped the Wallaces as the first family of London, which means that Msamati will be reprising his role as the family patriarch and master schemer.
“What I love about Ed, is that really, really deep down inside, he’s not a killer,” he says. “He’s not and I believe the audience kind of connects to that part of him. It’s not what he really wants to do… there’s nothing glorious about the violence. It’s just a means to an end.”
Despite this, one of Gangs of London’s biggest selling points is its action scenes. Often stomach-churningly gory and intricately choreographed, there’s nothing quite like it on television – and Msamati and Shuka are having a great time with it, up to a point.
“The rehearsal period was lots of fun. And then filming them, that was hard,” Msamati tells me. “Let’s just say that my esteemed colleague here [Orli] literally broke bones. And add to that, one of our amazing stunt performers who is literally in real life a martial arts champion - I knocked him out cold.”
When I tell Dìrísù this, he snorts: “Rookies.” As well he might: he’s been filming most of his own stunts for the show since season one, and as the lead character, there’s a lot of them.
“I know the action is a massive talking point on Gangs of London, but it actually has been a pleasure to be able to mix my athleticism and my love of physically using my body with work,” he says (possibly not surprising from a man whose last role was as a buttoned up, breeches-clad romantic Regency hero in search of a wife, in the period comedy Mr. Malcolm’s List).
“To be able to blend violence and storytelling is not an opportunity I’ve been doing that much. It’s part of the job. But actually, it’s an enjoyable part of the job.”
Alongside Dìrísù, Msamati, Shuka and the rest (and Gangs does have some female characters, though few except Kane, played by Amanda Drew, and Narges Rashidi’s character Lale, in season one, had much power), the show is set to be shaken up this season with the arrival of a rather sinister newbie: Georgian gangster Koba.
However, actor Waleed Zuaiter insists that his role is not to be an out-and-out villain – understandably, given that the show is packed with criminals.
“I see him as just a real special antagonist,” Zuaiter explains. “The best way to describe Koba is that he knows instinctively that you’re either predator or prey, and you always have to be one step ahead of your adversaries. And so in this kind of world, he thrives.
“He’s an opportunist. He comes to London and he sees, ‘Oh, my God, wow, look at all this.’ And that gets to a gangsters ego and to their ambition, like, ‘I can rule this.’ So that is very complex.”
With all that in mind, what’s the key to Gangs of London’s success? Hardy is blunt. “I would like to think it is genuinely because you’re watching something that you haven’t seen before, that you don’t get on television and certainly on UK TV,” he says.
“A thrilling emotional family crime drama with outrageous and uncompromising thrilling roller coaster action. You normally get one of those but not the other. There’s lot of family crime dramas. And there’s lots of action shows and things like that, but to have something that melds them… that’s what we’ve been trying to balance.”
