Merchant Gunning for The Outlaws
With Bristol-set comedy crime thriller The Outlaws now in its third series, things are really starting to ramp up for the ragtag bunch of community service colleagues.
The series, co-created by The Office co-writer Stephen Merchant, follows a group of strangers from all walks of life who meet when they have to serve a community service sentence together. Their luck changed when they found a bag of cash, but they soon discovered that its true owners were dangerous people and not to be messed with.
Famous faces like Merchant, Christopher Walken and Richard E Grant come together with newer actors cutting their teeth to form an ensemble cast that finds the perfect balance between thriller and comedy, which proves all the more vital as the stakes get higher in the plot of series three.
Merchant, 49, also plays terrible lawyer, Greg, and Baby Reindeer star Jessica Gunning, 38, plays community service supervisor, Diane.
Says Merchant, “When I went into the writers’ room on this series, I said, ‘All I know is that someone’s going to show up with a dead body’. And I didn’t have any idea whose body it was, or why they had their body, but I knew that if I’m doing series three of a crime thriller, someone is going to show up with a dead body. So that was our jumping off point.
“The idea is that they think they’re moving on with their lives after the hardships of the last series. They framed this ruthless drug dealer, the Dean, he’s awaiting trial, and they think they’re in the clear – then Rani shows up with a body in the back of her car.
“Meanwhile, the ruthless crime lord is likely to get off and come seeking revenge. So it’s throwing those two pressures at them, and then seeing how these sort of relatively suburban people cope with that. How do you bury a body? And how do you outwit a ruthless crime lord for the second time? Just continuing to turn the heat up on them.
“I think it’s the highest stakes that they’ve faced in all of the series.
“I think the jumping off point for me is always, How would I react in these situations? And there’s natural humour that comes from that, because I wouldn’t know how to dispose of a body!
“So that’s where a lot of the humour comes from, to me – real people reacting to these extreme situations."
The Outlaws, BBC One, Thursday, 9pm