Guy Ritchie Serves up a Meaty Thriller-Comedy Series on Netflix with ‘The Gentlemen’

 From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
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Guy Ritchie Serves up a Meaty Thriller-Comedy Series on Netflix with ‘The Gentlemen’

 From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)
From left, Daniel Ings, Kaya Scodelario and Theo James, cast members in "The Gentlemen," pose together at a photo call for the Netflix film, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024, at the Tudum Theatre in Los Angeles. (AP)

When we first meet the hero of Guy Ritchie's new Netflix series, he's not exactly what you'd expect from a Guy Ritchie hero. He's a peacekeeper for the United Nations, under orders to de-escalate tensions. Can that really last, this being a Guy Ritchie series? Doubtful.

“The Gentlemen,” a captivating mix of menacing thriller, satire, soap opera, gangster caper and absurdist humor, will eventually have blood splashing on walls, but it delights in the promise of violence more than the acts themselves.

“Like ‘Jaws,’” says cast member Max Beesley. “You don’t see that shark for an hour and a quarter of the film. But the idea of it is terrifying, you know? And I think that’s quite clever.”

“The Gentlemen,” a sort of British take on “Breaking Bad,” follows an English aristocrat who inherits his family's asset-rich but cash-poor estate and farm only to discover that it also has a massive secret weed farm, run by gangsters. At the same time, he urgently needs to bail his bumbling older brother out of massive debt to even more gangsters.

How the newly titled duke navigates this criminal underworld propels the eight episodes. “Without knowing it, you have stepped into a world that you are not familiar with," he is told. The series begins streaming Thursday.

Theo James stars as the duke, and he says he loved the “idea of a man falling down a rabbit hole and learning to love violence and power and what that means.”

James says, “He thinks he knows power because he’s been in the army and he’s part of the aristocracy, but he realizes power comes in many different forms.”

“The Gentlemen” has Ritchie’s typical examinations of criminality, but it’s less hyperkinetic and frantic than many of his films like “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” allowing scenes to breathe and characters to deepen. The body count is even lower.

“We’re used to seeing Guy Ritchie in 90 minutes — it’s hard cuts and bombastic, which this is. But we had to make sure that we had characters that felt that they could live through eight episodes and beyond,” says James.

The series has been spun off from the writer-director's 2019 film of the same name and features con jobs, a man dancing in a chicken suit, the always-welcome presence of Vinnie Jones, manic murder chases, gagged hostages, a Lamborghini heist, some beheadings and a soundtrack of choirs chanting religious text.

“We’ve just been given a much bigger canvas,” says Beesley. “The strokes are as thick, the paint is as thick. It’s just a multi-multifaceted bit of drama that incorporates everything that I think audiences like — drama, comedy, action. It’s all in there.”

In Ritchie’s world, the low-class gangsters who wear tracksuits are the same as the snooty upper classes who wear $50,000 three-piece suits — both groups cultured enough to appreciate the design of a classic Mercedes and a properly decanted 2002 Romanée-Conti.

“He’s making the point that the British landed gentry aristocracy really are the original gangsters of the British class society,” says Daniel Ings, who plays the duke's older brother. “There’s kind of like a need to fight for survival in both of those worlds.”

The series also stars Joely Richardson, Giancarlo Esposito, Shane Walker and Kaya Scodelario, who plays Susie, a very cool but very non-nonsense underworld captain, who says things like: “Once you start the killing, you have to finish the killing.”

“It was one of the rare times where I instantly knew I wanted to play this character with every fiber of my being. I kind of loved her immediately and wanted to get under her skin. I just knew that I could bring something to her and that she would be exciting,” Scodelario says.

“Especially in this world — this Guy Ritchie universe where a lot of times the focus has been on these male characters — I thought would be really fun and interesting to introduce Susie, who can kind of go toe to toe with all of them.”

The series — written by Ritchie and Matthew Read and with the first two episodes directed by Ritchie — enjoys refinement with aggression, which is the title of the pilot episode and could be Ritchie’s calling card here. There is also his characteristic quirky sense of humor.

“Finding that line between the ridiculous and the benign — finding hilarity, but not too hard on the silliness so the stakes are not lost, but then finding drama but not too dramatic so it becomes melodramatic in any way — weaving that line was always a very specific and quite complex thing to do,” says James.

The cast hopes the series can find a worldwide audience despite being rooted in the grand estates of England. It is, after all, about more than just a duke bluffing his way through the world of criminals.

“The heart of it for me is that it’s a family drama,” says Scodelario. “It’s all these different families realizing that they all need each other to coexist, and they want to protect their family above everything else. And I think that’s just a really interesting narrative.”



Daniel Radcliffe, Jeremy Strong Win Tony Awards

Daniel Radcliffe accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for "Merrily We Roll Along" during the 77th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 16, 2024, in New York. (AP)
Daniel Radcliffe accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for "Merrily We Roll Along" during the 77th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 16, 2024, in New York. (AP)
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Daniel Radcliffe, Jeremy Strong Win Tony Awards

Daniel Radcliffe accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for "Merrily We Roll Along" during the 77th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 16, 2024, in New York. (AP)
Daniel Radcliffe accepts the award for best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical for "Merrily We Roll Along" during the 77th Tony Awards on Sunday, June 16, 2024, in New York. (AP)

The Tony Awards for excellence in Broadway theater Sunday highlighted history with awards for a musical on the suffragette movement, a gritty remake of a book set in the 1960s and a tale of a 1970s rock band.

The ceremony took place for the first time at New York City's Lincoln Center with Tony-nominated and Oscar-winning actress Ariana DeBose hosting the awards ceremony for the third year in a row, after presiding over last year's writerless event with an elaborately choreographed dance number.

Shaina Taub won best score and best book of a musical for "Suffs," the story of the suffragette movement, featuring an all-woman cast.

"Stereophonic" took the Tony Awards for best play and best direction for Daniel Aukin. David Adjmi's play about a 70s-era rock band making an album, featuring original songs by Will Butler, formerly of Arcade Fire, broke the record for the most nominations for a play in Tonys history.

"Succession" star Jeremy Strong won best lead actor in a play for his role in the Henrik Ibsen play "Enemy of the People," and Daniel Radcliffe, best known for his starring role in the Harry Potter movie franchise, won best featured actor for "Merrily We Roll Along."

Will Brill beat out two other actors in his production, "Stereophonic," for best featured actor in a play. Kara Young, who is the first Black actor, male or female, to be nominated for a Tony three years in a row, won the award for best featured actress in a play for her role in "Purlie Victorious."

Justin Peck won the best choreography Tony for the dance musical "Illinoise," which brought Sufjan Steven’s 2005 concept album “Illinois” to the stage.

Danya Taymor won for direction of a musical an adaptation of S.E. Hinton's coming-of-age novel “The Outsiders,” upsetting favored “Merrily We Roll Along” actor Maria Friedman.

Dancers including DeBose, reviving her Oscar-winning role as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s film version of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to Broadway legend Chita Rivera, who died this in January at the age of 91.

During a pre-show event hosted by actors Julianne Hough and Utkarsh Ambudkar and streamed on the free platform Pluto TV, Tonys were awarded mostly in technical categories.