Why it’s all fights on the night for Gangs Of London’s Sope
THE actor Sope Dirisu is right at the centre of the bone-crunching action in television thriller Gangs Of London, in which he’s shot at, stabbed — and stomped on, just for good measure.
The nine-part crime series has become one of Sky’s biggest hits. Shown at the height of the virus shutdown, it features Dirisu as Elliot Finch, a mysterious newcomer who impresses damaged kingpin Sean Wallace (Joe Cole) with a display of lethal ingenuity during a violent confrontation with a group of tough guys in a pub.
It’s one of several spectacular fight scenes he’s involved in, and he attributed their
power to the skills of the show’s ace stunt co-ordinator, Jude Poyer, and his team.
To ensure he was right for the role they put him through a fight test before they cast him. The 29-year-old said he walked into a room and found ‘a bunch of stuntmen sitting around looking like they were going to beat me up’.
‘Thankfully, it wasn’t that,’ he laughed. ‘They gave me a little fight, to see if I could follow directions, and they wanted to see how I looked doing the movements.’ It was important that brawling looked like second nature to Finch. The sequences, influenced by martial arts films, are some of the best ever shot for the small screen (indeed, some viewers complained it looked too gruesome). This is a drama where rivals don’t shake hands: they chop them off.
Dirisu played American football at school and at college, where he read economics. ‘I’ve definitely got a robustness to my body,’ he boasted down the line from Luton, where he has been isolating with his parents and younger sister.
He had a video chat once with Pete Carroll, the legendary American football coach of the Seattle Seahawks. ‘He told me one of the keys to success in all contact sports is to have a reckless abandon for your body. It’s about the willingness to go over and above the call of duty,’ said the actor, who has appeared in Humans and Undercover on TV and several plays in London. (He was Coriolanus for the Royal Shakespeare Company; and Biff Loman in Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s searing version of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman.)
He sings well, too, as he proved in One Night In Miami at the Donmar Warehouse.
Dirisu’s physicality is one of his trademarks — but for Gangs Of London, a physique like Chris Hemsworth or Michael B. Jordan was not required because Elliot ‘isn’t a superhero’. Dirisu’s dad is a massive movie fan and took him to all the big action films, starring the likes of Tom Cruise and Jackie Chan, when he was growing up.
He joked that when his family binged on Gangs Of London his mother didn’t bat an eyelid as she watched her son being pummelled to a pulp. ‘Yeah, why wasn’t she more scared for me?!’ he said, laughing.
Thanks to the success of Gangs Of London a second season has been promised — and Dirisu has also been added to Ladbrokes’ list of favourites to take over from Daniel Craig as 007. I think he’d be absolutely cracking as Ian Fleming’s superphysical secret agent.