Ganging up:
Rivals battle for mob supremacy.
There are echoes of HBO’s Succession and 1972’s The Godfather in Gangs Of London, a drama about contemporary organised crime on the mean streets of the UK’s capital.
Finn Wallace (akin to Logan Roy and Don Corleone) is the most powerful criminal in London, with billions of pounds flowing through his organisation each year.
Then suddenly, in the 90-minute opener, he’s dead, assassinated and nobody knows who ordered the hit. Succession started in much the same way, with Logan Roy incapacitated by a stroke. Death is much more final though, and Finn’s impulsively violent son Sean takes his father’s place – shades of Sonny Corleone here.
Sean wants revenge and isn’t afraid to use extreme methods, shattering an uneasy truce brokered over the years by his father. Soon, he’s up against the Albanian mafia, Kurdish militants who control the heroin trade, the tough-guy Travellers gang, and a Pakistani drug baron whose son is running for Mayor of London.
Veteran Irish actor Colm Meaney, best known for his role as Chief Miles O’Brien in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, plays Finn Wallace, who has a major part despite being killed off in the first episode. Alongside him, as his wife Marian, is Michelle Fairley (Game Of Thrones’ Catelyn Stark), and Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders’ John Shelby) as their son, Sean.
Meaney acknowledges that it was unusual to be cast in a series that begins with your funeral.
“I looked at it and thought,
‘You really want me to do this? I’m dead on the first page.’ But there are flashbacks in the first few episodes. I love the writing and the storyline. It’s gripping. As the saying goes, ‘There are no small parts, only small actors’, but I get that you need to establish this strong patriarch from the get-go, the influence he had on his sons and the city and so on,” says the 67-year-old actor.
“He’s established as a powerful player in the underworld when he’s killed. His great strength was at building alliances. He wasn’t just about the Irish and Anglo-Irish gangs he was good at forming bonds across, which isn’t to say he wasn’t also prepared to do anything.
“He wasn’t a great statesman. He was a very violent criminal and incredibly ruthless.
“There’s a flashback where he takes the two boys out when they’re very young and expects them to kill a guy who’s misbehaved. To watch a boy murder somebody? I found that shocking and powerful.” Despite this darkness in his character, Finn Wallace held on to family as central to his life. As well as Sean, he has a daughter, Valene, who has distanced herself from her father and become a doctor. There’s also another son, Billy, a recovering heroin addict. Plus Finn has always counted his childhood friend Ed Dumani, and his son and daughter, as extended family.
“There’s a flashback after they’ve pulled off a coup, Finn’s drunk and he talks to them all, the Dumanis included, about family, the name and what it means. But it’s about loyalty, who they are, what they’ve made – that drives him as much as making money in some ways, although he’s desperate to hold on to his empire,” says Meaney. There’s one flaw in this – Finn was planning to retire and live in the Maldives with his mistress.
“The veneer was one of a happyish family, but Marian knew there was a lot going on she wouldn’t approve of, but she wouldn’t rock the boat,” says Michelle Fairley.
“She knew about one other person and stopped it. She accepted that he would stray but it would never jeopardise their relationship or the structure of their family. She assumed there was no way he’d risk losing her or the family.”
Marian had helped Finn and Ed Dumani build up their empire and hasn’t taken well to being sidelined over the years, says Fairley.
“At the beginning they were a formidable pack that had their fingers in many pies. Marian was basically a street fighter, not afraid to get down and dirty. It’s only when Marian has children that Finn doesn’t want her in the business so much. She has to take a back seat, which is not what she wanted but agreed to, very reluctantly.
“When we pick the story up there are lots of surprises for Marian because she hadn’t been intricately involved for a long time. It’s all about who’s keeping secrets from whom and for what reason.”
“He wasn’t a great statesman. He was a very violent criminal and incredibly ruthless.”
– Colm Meaney