No TV show currently airing has quite as high a death rate as Gangs Of London, with no central character safe from a swift, brutal, and highly imaginative murder.
But the relentless, devilishly inspired violence that has made the Sky series, co-created by The Raid director Gareth Evans, a cult hit since its debut in 2020 is also what makes interviewing the cast a challenge. With major figures dispatched from episode one onwards, there’s an extensive list of spoilers everybody must avoid directly bringing up – and that makes it even harder to talk about if you’re a newcomer to this world.
Lurking in the background for the first couple of episodes, Andrew Koji’s Zeek is a silent assassin with secret ties to the London underworld and a major part to play in shifting the city’s power dynamics as the season progresses. However, the Bullet Train star has been warned off discussing this in greater detail even with the journalists who have seen all eight episodes of season three.
“It’s been pretty tricky avoiding a minefield of spoilers when talking about Zeek”, laughed Koji. “He’s been hired to track down Sean Wallace (Joe Cole), but he’s an assassin who doesn’t play by any of the rules of the gangs – he comes from nowhere and works for himself.
“He’s a hand grenade thrown into the mix who causes all sorts of chaos. He’s the most traumatised character I’ve ever played; he appears cold hearted but has all these layers beneath.”
The season opens with Elliot Carter (Sope Dirisu) having broken bad, his past as an undercover cop firmly in the rearview as he’s now the city’s most powerful drug dealer. However, after a shipment of cocaine is poisoned, causing the deaths of 600 people around the city, it’s clear someone is orchestrating his downfall – and, in turn, the city’s other drug empires.
As this plot is the central focus for the first two episodes, you might be caught off guard by how Zeek completely transforms the story from left field, all whilst appearing unaligned to any single gang jostling for total domination. Koji was told about the function his character would play when signing up, but nothing in the first two scripts he was sent helped him get a handle on the character, joking that he “had to learn how to become mysterious” before arriving on set.
Because nobody wants to risk discussing spoilers, you have to take the team’s word for it that he’s a rich addition to this hyper-violent universe. For Koji especially, it’s the kind of well-developed character he never expected would be written for an Asian actor in a British production.
He explained: “It’s the kind of role that, when I was a lot younger, I never thought I would be able to play. When I first started my acting journey at 18, there wasn’t the same representation we have now; I only saw actors of Asian descent doing what I wanted to do in Asian cinema.
“I left the UK to go to Thailand, with the plan of eventually going to Japan, as I thought that’s how I’d be able to get work, and assumed I’d keep working there as I didn’t expect parts for me in English film or TV. But we’re now in a very different world, and I feel very lucky – I never thought an interesting, unique character of this strength would be part of a British production.”
As a martial artist, who moonlighted as a stunt double before his acting breakthrough, the intense action of Gangs of London afforded Koji a chance to play to his other strengths too.
“As an introduction to the series, it was really cool to jump straight in and film a fight scene with Sope over three-and-a-half days; an intense sequence to shoot, but very fun with an actor as physically gifted as him. The difference between Gangs and other productions is that the camera is more up close and intimate with the actors performing the stunts, and there was one point where the camera got too close for comfort.
“I gave the camera lens a nice, mean right hook, and it evaporated with the power. I think the repairs came out of my fee!”
Another intense newcomer in this world is Cornelius Quinn, played by Game Of Thrones/Day Of The Jackal star Richard Dormer, a revenge hungry figure who wants to supplant Marian (Michelle Fairley) as leader of the Wallace Family after they wronged him decades earlier. Dormer laughs that it was a delight to play “a character with no redeeming qualities”, and that to emphasise his tyranny, the goal was to make him appear almost mundane, like a respectable member of society.
He told Zavvi: “When you’re playing a psychopath, the goal is playing them like they’re normal. The scariest people aren’t outwardly psychotic, they’re the people with something not quite right behind their eyes, where you gradually discover their lack of empathy.
“Actors are all a bit crazy, so playing someone this intense means magnifying the sociopath within us. You don’t want to play someone like this as crazy, you have to find ways to make them feel believable, which as an actor is quite easy, as this job is by its very nature psychotic – we have to get upset, cry and go crazy over imaginary stuff every day of our lives!”
Dormer’s biggest input into the creative process was suggesting that his character wield a very specific weapon; a Shillelagh, a black thorn fighting stick. It has its roots in 1800s Ireland as an item many secretly held as a form of self-defence from the British, but the actor explains that his character is likely uninterested in its historical background.
“From reading the scripts, I knew this was a guy that enjoyed violence, so I knew he wouldn’t want to use a gun – that's too impersonal. He wants to connect with his victims, and so that’s why he’d use that stick; he wants to see them up close, to take in the terror in their eyes before he kills them, because he’s an absolute savage!”
Of the returning characters, Marian Wallace remains one of London’s most powerful figures as we enter season three, but is also carrying a major psychological toll as her family have kept dropping like flies around her.
Fairley told Zavvi: “Professionally, Marian is as strong as she’s ever been, and if you were to look at her from the outside, you wouldn’t have a hint of her internal trauma because she masks it so brilliantly. She’s at a personal rock bottom, which she keeps entirely to herself; her conversations and interactions with people are limited and purely operational, so nobody has a sense of what she’s going through.
“Her life is incredibly vulnerable – she might be the most vulnerable character in the series, even though she has a great tenacity and a drive to succeed and survive. But that’s due to her grief and anger; she gets stronger and more monstrous with the more suffering she takes on board.”
Fairley’s fellow cast members have described the third season as more character driven than its predecessors, but she wants to assure fans that even with intense personal arcs driven by trauma, the team are still delivering everything audiences expect.
“You have to keep your fans happy, after all!” she said. “People love this show for the action sequences, the chases, the fights, the overall battle of survival, and you get a healthy dose of all of those alongside the character drama.
“Plus, there are all the plot twists and surprises I can’t talk about – it has a good balance of everything you’d want and more.”
Gangs Of London Season 3 Premieres on Sky/NOW on Thursday, 20th March.
Pre-order the Season 3 Boxset here.
