There will be blood
Guy Ritchie brings his blockbuster gangster film, The Gentlemen, to the small screen, and it’s high-octane stuff. Donal O’donoghue talks to two of its stars,
“Iwas to play two roles in Snatch,” says Vinnie Jones of the last time he worked with lm-maker, Guy Ritchie, at the end of the Noughties. “ en Guy phoned me and said, I’ve got good news and bad news. e good news is that Brad Pitt is in the movie. And I said ‘Shaddup’, thinking we’ve gone from Jason Flemyng in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels to a Hollywood superstar in Snatch and…” Jones gets so caught up in his story that he never gets to tell who, apart from Bullet-tooth Tony, he was meant to play in Snatch. Maybe there was no bad news for the former pro footballer turned hardman actor because Snatch and before that, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels set the mould for all that would follow. Now 24 years on, Ritchie has once again called on the unique services of Jones, menacingly polite opposite Joely Richardson’s blue-blood in the TV spin-o of his gangster ick, e Gentlemen.
Jones, sporting a at cap, and Richardson (of the Redgrave acting dynasty) seem an unlikely pair, but apparently get on like a house on re. “I’ve gotta tell ya, it was like watching paint dry mate,” says Jones of his co-star’s considered approach to acting. “I was like ‘Come on Joely, I’ve got to go home!’ and she’s tearing the arse out of it.” Richardson laughs. “Stop it Vinnie, he might believe you (I don’t). Vinnie loved me and we got on great, which was weird because we are so di erent. Yet we have a lot in common.” Jones gives her a look. “What do we have in common? We both worked with your mum (Vanessa Redgrave) but what else is there?” Richardson laughs. “I’m sworn to secrecy. Whatever an actor shares with me, I will not share. I’m afraid we’re going to have to be mysterious on this one.” is one is e Gentlemen, Ritchie’s small-screen sequel of sorts to his 2019 lm in which some cash-strapped British to s get mixed up with some geezer gangsters. As ever with a Ritchie lm, the cast was a who’swho of Hollywood, including Matthew Mcconnaughey as an American drugs baron, Hugh Grant as a scuzzy journalist and Colin Farrell having a ball as a criminal boxing coach called Coach. It did big business at the box-o ce (north of $115 million from a reported $22 million budget) and brought us back to the Guy Ritchie world of Lock, Stock… and its smoking barrels. Perhaps a small-screen follow-up was inevitable, and now here it comes from Net ix, burning rubber and spilling claret as we are bundled into a yarn about to s and toughs, illegal boxing, car boots lled with contraband, a man dressed as a chicken, severed body parts and Vinnie Jones reunited with his shotguns.
e Gentlemen features a di erent cast of characters, but the scéal is essentially the same: a member of the English aristocracy ( eo James) returns home from the army to discover that underneath his daddy’s estate
When I signed onto this, I didn’t know about the Guy Ritchie experience
– JOELY RICHARDSON
is Europe’s biggest weed farm. e cast also includes Kaya Scodelario, as the beauty and brains behind this lucrative drug empire, the great Ray Winstone as her old man (and crime kingpin), while Richardson is the recently widowed Lady Sabrina, mummy to eo James and his nitwit brother (Daniel Ings). It’s hard to tell from the opening episodes what Lady S is all about or where her story is going to go. “Same here,” says Richardson. “She’s enigmatic, she’s serious, she’s the matriarch, and she adores her children. But she also holds a lot inside. e question is: ‘Is she ever going to let go?’”
Jones is Geo , the caretaker on the estate, someone who knows his way around a double-barrelled shotgun and not just for bagging game. Geo also has a pet hedgehog, which borrows from the actor’s real life, as portrayed in last year’s reality TV series, Vinnie Jones: In the Country, in which the actor rabbited on about his love of nature (and his so spot for hedgehogs) from the eyrie of his country pile, nestled amid 150 acres of rolling meadows. “Geo is the con dant of the family and someone that his late Grace trusted with so much. As the series develops, that all comes to light. Every member of the family trusts Geo but he has his own secrets with each one of them. And as the family con dant, they all go to Geo when they have problems, Lady Sabrina perhaps more than most of the others.”
e eight-part Net ix series, a di erent beast to the 2019 lm in some ways, once again plays with the British class system, even as it tickles the underbelly of the underworld. “I think the TV show is a lot richer and more layered with greater depth,” says Richardson. Jones shrugs. “You’d have to have more depth with those eight episodes, wouldn’t ya?” he says blithely. “But the biggest challenge is to make a great TV series from a great movie. at’s the risk. For me, personally, the fact the Ray Winstone is in this, and I’m a big fan of the man, meant a lot. I’m sure that will give us a bit of time to convince people that the TV series is every bit as good as the lm. So don’t judge it straight away, thinking Mcconnaughey or whoever is not in it, this is a completely di erent breed of animal so let it breathe and give it a chance.”
Some years back, I was on set with Guy Ritchie during the lming of his epic take on the legend of King Arthur. He was directing a scene remotely via a battery of monitors while simultaneously elding questions from journalists. It was a bit show-o y but there was no doubting the lmmaker’s energy, a kineticism that rubs o on his cast. “Guy hands you the pages when you arrive on set, collaborates closely with the cast and it makes for a really free way of working,” says Richardson. “I didn’t know any di erent when I rst worked with him on Lock, Stock so I thought this was the norm,” says Jones. “At the end of shooting, late one night, I said that the whole experience had been so emotional, and that line got into the lm. Guy just threw it in there. For me, it’s a lovely way of working but
The biggest risk is to make a great TV series from a great movie
– VINNIE JONES
maybe for some there is the fear that you might make yourself look a bit of an idiot on camera.”
Ritchie directed the rst two episodes of the TV series, which have a cohesion lacking in the third episode, but the show has an undeniable energy, and a narrative win where one wrong move can have many unintended consequences. Or, as one of the characters puts it, “Once you start the killing you have to nish the killing” as eo James attempts to extricate himself from the criminal world, only to realise its many fringe bene ts. “All of Guy’s stu is a bit like that,” says Jones. “It starts o at a nice slow beat and then suddenly it takes o – DEN-DEN-DEN-DEN
– so that by the end it’s mayhem. So, you get this story being told and then suddenly there’s this massive explosion and that’s that. It’s hard to be speci c with e Gentlemen because we’ve been briefed so thoroughly on what we can and can’t say in interviews.”
Considering how much they are linked in the public consciousness, e Gentlemen is perhaps surprisingly just Jones’s third collaboration with Guy Ritchie, following Lock, Stock and Snatch. “He’s in the same boat as Tarantino,” says the actor of the lm-maker. “I’ve made a Tarantino movie (sort of – Tarantino was executive producer of 2008’s Hell Ride) and I’ve seen the similarities. Guy is very British in what he does, while Tarantino is very American. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t an actor on the planet who wouldn’t work for Guy.” Cue Joely Richardson. “When I signed onto this, I didn’t know about the Guy Ritchie experience, which is all about not knowing very o en what’s going to happen next. Beforehand, people were telling me, ‘It will be a very di erent experience’ and when I asked what that was they said, ‘You’ll just have to see for yourself ’”.