‘UNLEASHING CHAOS’ – WELSH STAR ON GANGS OF LONDON
FROM its dramatic towering g skyline to the dark, seedy y underbelly of its criminal l fraternity, there’s nothing g about Sky Atlantic’s ultra-violent t new hit show Gangs of London that at suggests Wales to its viewers.
Yet, despite being set in the blood- d thirsty world of gangsters and miles away from Cymru’s countryside, there’s a strong homegrown presence at the very heart of the hardhitting drama, which has been earning rave reviews online.
Indeed, the character who kickstarts the whole story is Welsh, a young lad called Darren (Aled ap Steffan) who’s duped into killing feared crime boss Finn Wallace (played by Colm Meaney) – a murder which prompts a street war between rival factions within the capital.
The sudden disintegration of this hitherto fragile alliance sees the Wallace family – now led by Peaky Blinders’ Joe Cole – forced to go head to head with all manner of multi-ethnic heavies.
Chief among them is a hardnut bunch of Welsh travellers, headed up by Mark Lewis Jones’ foreboding Kinney Edwards, who happens to be Darren’s dad.
So are they based on a real historical mob? It turns out not. In fact it’s actually just down to the Welsh links of the director and his actors.
“I thought it was refreshingly unstereotypical making them Welsh, because those types of characters are normally mally portrayed on screen as being Irish,” h,” said Wrexham-born Jones, best t known for his roles in both small all screen gems like Keeping Faith and cinematic blockbusters ckbusters such as Star Wars: rs: The Last Jedi.
“Also, Also, I’d worked with the director ctor Gareth Evans before ore on the Netflix horror film Apostle and loved his very y hands-on way of working – so when Gangs came along ng I jumped at the chance. nce.
“Now, Now, don’t n’t k now ow if it’s ’s because Gareth is from Aberdare and wanted to hear a familiar accent, but given that t he cast me I figured I might as well play Kinney Kin as a Welshman. An And I think it makes a nice change to the usual tele televisual cliches.”
Jones added that he even based his character on a guy he us used to play rugby with back h home. “Not Kinney’s capacity c for killing, obvio obviously,” he laughed. laughed “More the general p presence the guy had, that sense of being totally comfortable in your own skin...
“Ultimately, deep down, Kinney is really a good man, or at least he wants to be. He’s just driven to extremes by a situation that’s completely out of his control. His son’s done something that’s unleashed chaos and he ends up having to deal with that however he can.”
As director and co-creator of Gangs of London, Evans’ career started with a steady childhood diet of watching Bruce Lee videos at his home in Hirwaun, Rhondda Cynon Taf. But it was upon landing a gig several years ago to direct a documentary on an Indonesian martial art called Pencak Silat that Evans realised where the future lay.
“I knew straight away it would look spectacular in a movie, so when I met Iko Uwais – whose Silat school I was filming at – we decided to make one together,” Evans revealed in 2011.
A champion national fighter, Uwais became the Welshman’s secret weapon in bringing the discipline’s intense and complex style to the screen and the pair found great acclaim for their bonecrunching thriller The Raid in 2011 and it subsequent sequel, 2014’s The Raid 2.