SOPE DIRISU
THE GANGS OF LONDON STARISKICKINGASS, ON-SCREENANDOFF
GANGS OF LONDON journey could have turned out very differently. The man who would become Elliot Finch — an undercover police officer masquerading as a henchman for a London crime family — initially auditioned for the role of Alex, before getting word that the actor for Gangs’ ass-kicking lead had still not been found. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get, and you have to believe in yourself before other people believe in you,” says Dìrísù. “So I was like, ‘Oh, can I read for the role?’” It wasn’t long before series creator Gareth Evans realised that the man he was looking for had been in his midst all along, and Dìrísù’s physically imposing central performance (he did the vast majority of his stunts himself ) is one of the show’s best features.
It’s the first time many will have taken notice of the 30-year-old Londoner, but Dìrísù had been putting in the work across TV, film and stage since 2012, when he showed up for an open casting call 20 minutes away from where he had studied economics and played American football, at the University of Birmingham.
A steady stream of small roles followed in the likes of The Mill and Casual Vacancy, and his highest-profile gig pre-gangs was in The Huntsman: Winter’s War. However, it’s a Stuart Gatt-directed short film in 2016 titled The Dead Sea, in which Dìrísù plays a refugee trying to flee Libya, that he singles out as one of his formative projects. “I really felt that I had found something in my own craft that I didn’t know I had when it came to performing that role. I was immediately proud of it, and when I saw it I was like, ‘Yes, that is the sort of stuff that I want to do more of.’ I had set a new baseline.”
Another career highlight came on stage in the West End in 2019, when he teamed up with Wendell Pierce for a father/son act in an award-winning rendition of Death
Of A Salesman. For Dìrísù, it was a big moment. “I really felt that we were pushing each other every single day,” he recalls. “But also I had to stop and be like, ‘I’m doing this with Wendell Pierce!’ To have someone who is one of the leads in The Wire, [a TV show] that I share with my dad, playing my dad was a weird sort of full-circle moment for me to reflect on how far I've come.”
The latest indicator that Dìrísù has come a long way since 2012 is His House. Starring as Bol, an African refugee who is granted a house by the UK government only to discover that it’s haunted, Dìrísù is terrific in one of the scariest British films of recent times. It’s also the film where the theme of immigration — also present in The Dead Sea and Gangs Of London — is at its most potent. It’s clearly a topic that resonates with the actor. “The story of being a minority in a Western country is not just my home here. It’s very specific experiences that we have as consequences. Those stories need to be told not only for us to watch ourselves and be like, ‘Oh, I see myself in that a lot,’ but also so you can understand where someone’s coming from, and empathise with them.”
While he’s sure to return to the theme, in the near future he’s switching things up. While another season of Gangs Of London starts shooting soon, Dìrísù has a couple of films incoming: Mothering Sunday, a drama costarring Olivia Colman and Josh O’connor, and Silent Night, a Christmas-dinner comedy with Keira Knightley.
“I can’t say that any of the characters
I’ve played is like me to a tee,” says the actor, a nominee for this year’s BAFTA EE Rising Star Award. “But I can definitely see aspects of myself in all of them. At the same time, I really love watching transformation. So I’m always looking for a role that has nothing at all in common with the real me.” If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
GANGS OF LONDON IS OUT ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL NOW