Since Ritchie’s 1998 debut action comedy caper Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, his unremittingly laddish MO has helped prop up the patriarchy. It’s spent 25 years busting womankind down to clothes horses or comedy foils, while fast-tracking Jason Statham and even Vinnie Jones into bankable exemplars of British butchness.
The fact that his entertaining new Netflix series is called The Gentlemen, and amounts to a spin-off of his 2019 film of the same name, only underlines the point. Theo James, who plays a duke called Eddie Halstead, doesn’t demur when I put these points to him, but admits to being charmed by Ritchie’s world from an early age: “Lock, Stock was definitely part of my cultural zeitgeist as a teen. [Ritchie] created this British sub-genre with bombastic energy. It made a huge impression – we used to quote lines to each other in sixth form. It was quite seminal at the time.”
No doubt, but more than 25 years on, wouldn’t it be nice if Ritchie gave due representation to that 50%-plus of the population he’s largely ignored? You’d think he’d have the life experience to know strong women exist. This is a man, after all, who is a one-time Mr Madonna.
When I put these concerns to The Gentlemen’s female lead Kaya Scodelario, she nods vigorously. “It was something I was very concerned about, to be honest with you,” Scodelario says. “I insisted that I have a conversation with the showrunners to make sure that she [her character Susie Glass] would be a constant thread throughout the story, that she would have her own arc, that she would be front and centre. I didn’t want her to be swallowed up, which can happen, especially in a lot of Guy’s previous work.”
The child star of E4’s Skins, who has spent the past 15 years working Stateside, here plays a singular character. Susie Glass is not just glamorous but has more brains than all the show’s men put together. She plays a woman who runs a crime business, illicitly producing and selling weed while her crime boss dad (Ray Winstone, naturally) does a stretch at His Majesty’s cushiest open prison. The show is called The Gentlemen, but its key protagonist is a woman.
Another female star, Joely Richardson, who plays posh widow Lady Sabrina Halstead, tantalisingly describes the show as “putting Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders in a blender”. When undeniably hunky duke Eddie inherits his father’s estate, he returns from the army to find his country pile is propped up, not by the family yoghurt farm he’d supposed, but by the Glass’s cannabis factory built secretly beneath the dairy. The stately homes of England, as Noël Coward realised a long time ago, are frequently mortgaged to the hilt. But what Coward never imagined is that at least one family of Brit aristo would see off the bailiffs by installing a massive criminal enterprise in the grounds, managed by (no offence) an East End oik.
For Theo James, there’s something else in the blender. “Not that we would ever think to emulate The Godfather, because in my mind it’s one of the greatest movies of all time. But the idea of a relatively moral man returning to a family but then slowly his soul is corrupted – that was a touchpoint.” Duke Eddie is a tweedy British retread of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone: the duke wants to get his family out of the drug game but, just when he thinks he’s out, they keep pulling him back in.
James, best known for The White Lotus, says he struggled to play Eddie sympathetically. This is a curious admission, given that James is speaking to me during a lunch break in filming of an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Monkey in which, rather demandingly, he plays both of the twin brothers who find a toy monkey in the attic that may be associated with a spate of murders. “It’s kind of hyper-violent, but also comedic in a kind of Gremlins way if you remember that movie,” he says.
I have a certain disdain for the aristocracy. I came to it with the view that the aristocracy is responsible for an ingrained class system that has wreaked havoc on British culture for the last 300 years. They’re at least as criminal as the drug underworld.” He also struggled to play the duke to the manner born. “There was a moment when I got my bags out of the car and Guy said: ‘Don’t even think of doing that! You’re degrading your butler’s job. It would never cross Eddie’s mind to carry his own bags.’”
The Gentlemen undeniably plays with the British class system, chiefly by ramping up the sexual tension between Eddie’s hunky duke and Susie’s streetwise crim. “We had in mind Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd in [1980s crime drama] Moonlighting,” says James. “They worked together and yes there was sexual tension, but you can never resolve it.” So Eddie and Susie can never have a relationship? “Not without destroying the drama.”
When Scodelario walks into shot you know that any mere man or invertebrate toff who fails to take her seriously is making the biggest mistake of their lives. “Susie is probably the closest to my actual background of any character I’ve ever played,” says Scodelario. “I’m very working class. I’m the daughter of an immigrant who worked two or three jobs.”
One of the most striking things about The Gentlemen, indeed, is how several of its leads plunder their past lives for material. That great stalwart of Ritchie’s work, Vinnie Jones, the proverbial hardman memorialised by two images: grabbing Gazza’s knackers in a 1987 match between Wimbledon and Newcastle, and with two shotguns crisscrossed over his shoulders in the publicity stills for Lock, Stock, – here reverts to the mellow nature boy he was in his youth. Jones was raised in a bucolic idyll near Watford, Hertfordshire. “When I tell people I’ve never taken a drug in my life, they’re like, ‘What?’” he tells me. “But, as youngsters, it wasn’t our way. There was no fucking cocaine and stuff like that. Our way of getting high was finding a bird’s nest or getting a ferret that didn’t bite your hand off. Our hard drug was training a buzzard.”
Jones channels this rustic youth into his character gamekeeper Geoff Seacombe, loyal retainer to the Halsteads. When Duke Eddie visits his employee for tea, Jones shows off a menagerie of injured animals he’s nurturing, including a fox. Foxes, I ask Jones, can’t really be domesticated, can they? “Not really,” says Jones, “but Guy thought it would be funny. He visited me at home once and I had lots of animals living with me. Foxes are very scatty. They’ll come out to one person but as soon as anybody else comes, they’ll run under the bed or hide, you know, and then you can coax them out. But once it’s female season, you’ve got to watch them. They’re out and about, you know?” Quite so.
This serene persona of Geoff, Jones hopes, will transform TV executive’s perspective on the former footballer as he diversifies from go-to meathead to sensitive flower. “They just think of me as a hardman who’s going to fight bears in Russia, you know? They can’t think beyond the stereotype. I really want to make a nature programme like Jack Hargreaves.” I’ve even built a log cabin in my garden we could use for filming.”
This is a giddy enough mutation, but in The Gentlemen there is more. Those of you who have been pining since Gustavo Fring cleaned his last deep fat fryer at Los Pollos Hermanos are in for a treat. Ritchie has reincarnated Giancarlo Esposito’s endearing/terrifying drug dealer for this series. He plays Stanley Johnston, a successful African American meth dealer – the very line of work Fring pursued in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. In the Gentlemen, Johnston is an anglophile who longs to buy Eddie’s country pile, not to mention the outbuilding whose basement (just like the one Fring built under a laundry in Albuquerque) is a drug factory hidden from prying eyes.
This is compelling enough, but better is the speech that Ritchie and Matthew Read wrote for Esposito that skewers a thousand years of British history. “Do you know what I love about the British aristocracy?” asks Esposito rhetorically over drinks with Duke Eddie. “They’re the original gangsters. The reason they own 75% of this country is because they stole it. William the Conqueror was worse than Al Capone. When he came over from France he grabbed hold of everything he could get his hands on and then he set up a system so that he and his friends got to hold on to it for ever. Taxation. Education. The judiciary. It’s all designed to help the aristocracy to hold on to their land and their money.”
It must be lovely, I suggest to Esposito, to be a person of colour sticking it to Brits on their home turf and explaining our nation’s contribution to global white supremacy and structural racism?
By way of an answer, Esposito tells me a story. “When I first came to London, many years ago, I got off the plane with a white girlfriend who had blond hair down to the waist. As I walked through the customs hall, a bobby, with the hat, everything, walked next to me, just staring at me. I never paid attention to him whatsoever, because I kept in my conversation with the lady I was with. He didn’t say a word, but he sure tried to intimidate me.”
Welcome to London, I say to Esposito. “Yeah. And so it’s very special to be a person of colour to change the way people look at people who are black or brown.
“I wanted to work in Europe for a long time, and with Guy Ritchie in particular. But I never thought I’d get to play an important role like this. I’m playing one of the world’s richest men, who happens to be a black African American, but who carries himself with grace and aplomb, and is a good businessman.” Props to Ritchie for flipping that script, I say. “I absolutely agree. It changes the view of who we are as African American and Black people, right? We can combat the idea that it is just white people who run things. Or are elegant. Or are intelligent.”
The real gentleman of the show is not the duke in his mansion, nor the razor boys and herberts of this United Crimdom, but rather an elegant black man from the wrong side of the pond.
“It’s changing from how it was when white people dominated to the world being dominated by those who are the smartest, most intelligent, carry the most grace and are … ” Esposito pauses for effect, takes his voice down a few notes and looks at me seriously, “ … wily, shrewd and brutal.” Which, in four words, sums up not just Esposito’s character but the whole appeal of The Gentlemen.
The Gentlemen is on Netflix on Thursday 7 March
