‘The Gentlemen’s Daniel Ings on What He’d Like to See in Season 2

[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for The Gentlemen.]

The Big Picture

• In the Netflix series ‘The Gentlemen,’ Eddie Horniman inherits a cannabis empire, forcing him to choose between getting involved with the operation or losing his family’s estate.
• Freddy, Eddie’s older brother, feels entitled to power and wonders if he should try to take control from Eddie, leading to chaotic and unpredictable antics.
• Actor Daniel Ings highlights the appeal of playing Freddy and shares potential for character development in a second season.

From creator Guy Ritchie, who also directed the first two episodes, and inspired by the 2019 movie of the same name, the eight-episode Netflix series The Gentlemen is set in the same world of gangsters and aristocrats but with a new cast of colorful and unique characters. When Eddie Horniman (Theo James) unexpectedly finds himself in charge of his father’s country estate, he also discovers a portion of the cannabis empire that’s being run by Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) on its property. The two might come from very different worlds, but as Susie brings out the darker side of Eddie, he realizes he just might like it a little more than he expected, if only his unpredictable brother Freddy (Daniel Ings) doesn’t end up getting them killed first.

Being the eldest son, Freddy Horniman believes himself to be the one entitled to his family’s wealth and power, so when it goes to his brother Eddie instead, Freddy becomes even more petulant than usual. As his buffoonery increases to new heights and he feels ignored and dismissed, he wonders if maybe he could do better with the crime organization growing cannabis on his family’s estate.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Ings discussed what he’d like to see with Freddy if they get to do another season, wanting to continue to subvert expectations, basking in the afterglow of the audience response to this season, his desire to work with Ritchie, how liberating and fun it was to play someone like Freddy, his inspiration for the character, shooting the scenes in the chicken suit, that he’d love to deeper explorer the relationship between Freddy and his wife, getting unexpectedly and repeatedly slapped by James, and whether he’d like to play a character who’s a bit less of a shameless prick.

Collider: Have you had conversations about a possible Season 2 yet?

DANIEL INGS: At the minute, we’re all just glad it seems to have found an audience and that people are connecting with it and enjoying me dressed as a chicken. We’re basking in the afterglow of it coming out, and we haven’t talked about that yet.

The movie was pretty great. It had such an awesome cast that it made doing this a bit of a head scratcher when the TV series was first announced. But then, you watch the series, and it’s also great and it has its own awesome characters and cast. As you were reading the first script, what sold you on the TV series and the fact that it just works?

INGS: I remember watching the movie and thinking when I saw this idea of these aristocrats, I wanted to know more about them. I thought it was really smart that it takes the germ of the idea and it zeros in on that aspect of it. It exists in the same world, but we’re a little bit of the movie that wasn’t explored so much. And it was obviously the opportunity to get to work with Guy [Ritchie], particularly doing his thing with criminals and drugs and crazy plotlines.

Daniel Ings Found it Liberting and Fun To Play the Prick of ‘The Gentlemen’

Your character is a prick. He knows it and he even says it. What did you most enjoy about playing someone like that, who embraces that side of himself?

INGS: Really, I regularly get cast as massive pricks. I don’t know what it is. I guess I’m just giving off asshole vibes. It’s always fun to play those kinds of characters. Early on, when he has no self-awareness, it’s so liberating and fun. He just doesn’t give a shit how he’s received by people and doesn’t follow the social norms. Because it is over eight episodes, you have to show some growth. It would have been frustrating if he didn’t start to become a bit more aware of the hot mess he is.

But it doesn’t really make him any less of a hot mess.

INGS: It makes him more of one because he becomes aware and yet continues down the same path. The other thing that was attractive for me was that I found it funny on the page. When I was reading the will-reading scene, I was like, “You can just go up to 11 on this.” Guy’s process is that very often he would just throw out the script and you’d start building on the day. There is a real pain and a darkness in my character. There’s that moment I talk about going deer hunting with our dad when we were kids, and I shoot the deer and our dad was really proud, but I couldn’t kill the deer. That was originally in the first episode and, for some reason, it moved to the end of the season. I was always pushing for it to go back in, and it finally did. For me, that was the key to the character. He carried being the less favored son since childhood. I enjoyed getting to find those darker places, as well.

Daniel Ings Was Inspired By ‘Sexy Beast’ for His Chicken Suit Moment in ‘The Gentlemen’

This character really seems very similar to what I would imagine the Tasmanian Devil to be like in human form. He’s this whirlwind of chaos in every moment he finds himself in. Did you have any specific inspirations for him? Was there anyone you looked to, to shape him and your performance, or was that just on the page?

INGS: It developed as it went. I come from a comedy background, in a sense. Not by design, but that’s just how it’s panned out, in some of the work and the shows that I’ve done. I’m always trying to imagine where I can find the funny in it, which comes from that Guy Ritchie world, to some degree. There’s that scene in the first episode where I get dressed up as a chicken and things don’t end well. I was dressed as a chicken doing cocaine in the bathroom, and we had to figure out what that was gonna look like. All I could come up with was how, in the movie Sexy Beast, Ben Kingsley’s character is just talking to himself in the mirror and he’s psyching himself up. Because they had this big mirror in the bathroom, I was like, “Okay, I just need to be talking to myself and having this conversation that doesn’t make any sense to the audience.” That became a theme, in a way. You can tangibly sense the conversation Freddy is having with himself, in his head, and it’s this feedback loop that doesn’t make any sense to anyone else. It’s fun to lean into that wildness. I thought about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He’s so high the whole time that it was like, go big or go home.

When you were in the middle of doing that and things got so crazy, and you have Theo James and Kaya Scodelario over in the corner, is it ever hard to get out of your own head?

INGS: Guy shoots quick, so he almost doesn’t give you time. He’ll come in and say, “We’re not shooting any of this, so you’ll need to do something else. Okay, roll cameras.” And you’re off. The beauty of that is that you don’t have time to overthink it. You just have to go. And then, he calls, “Cut,” and you’ve got 25 seconds before he calls action again to scuttle over to the corner to Kaya and Theo and be like, “What did I just do with this? Was any of that usable? Have I just tanked my career?” It really was a question of giving over quite a bit of trust because so much of that sequence is in the editing, the way that it jumps around in time, the sense of the music building, and all that stuff, which is impossible to conceive of, in the moment. I don’t think it’s in it, but my chicken was laying eggs, at one point. They wanted me to actually lay an egg. But then, he cut it together and you’re like, “Oh, okay, that’s what the show is.”

You’ve previously talked about how that moment when you run out onto the lawn and you slip on the grass was not something that had been planned. What was it like to discover that they actually used that? Were there other moments, throughout production, where little things would happen that you were surprised actually made it into the finished series?

INGS: Oh, so many things. That was one where I slipped and the first A.D. called, “Cut,” and we were all like, “No!” I was really pleased because I begged them to keep that in. I tried to recreate it on the next few takes, but it was impossible because your body won’t let you do it. There are things that I do in the show where I just don’t know what I was thinking. After the will-reading scene, where it suddenly cuts to slow motion and you can hear my voice saying all this stuff and I’m sticking my tongue out, I was just like, “What the fuck was I thinking?” But I think it worked really well. I’m a fan of watching that stuff. I enjoy seeing it. To a degree, I guess I don’t have a particular problem with shaming myself in front of millions of people.

Why do you think Freddy seems not to be deterred by shame? What is his real motivation and his driving force when, no matter how wrong things turn out and how bad his ideas go, he just seems to have more of them?

INGS: He’s an addict. For Freddy, that is all about his ego. He’s a gambling addict. When a gambler starts losing at the tables, they don’t get up and walk away, they double down because now they’ve gotta win it back. Every time Freddy is shamed, he goes, “Okay, now I have an even bigger mountain to climb, in terms of reclaiming my status, so now I’m gonna have to go even bigger than I did the last time.”

Freddy and Wham Tam Have So Much More Backstory To Explore in ‘The Gentlemen’

Personally, I would have loved to have gotten to see more between Freddy and his wife. I would absolutely love to know what they’re doing when they’re alone together. How do you view their relationship? What do you think they’re doing when we don’t see them?

INGS: Chanel Cresswell, who plays my wife in it, is a phenomenal actress, and she’s worked with Shane Meadows a lot. She comes from an improvisational background and was always thinking a lot about backstory. She came up with some amazing, in my opinion, pitches for them having met at university and Wham Tam had been shamed in some way and they bonded over that. She really plotted that stuff out. I would have loved to have seen more. I would have loved to have just seen more of Chanel, generally, and selfishly would have loved to have been in more scenes with her. If it ever does go on, I would love to see more of that. It’s a great example of someone who can do so much with a tiny amount. She can have one line of dialogue and it speaks volumes, or one raise of her eyebrow and it can really convey so much.

And she’s so unfazed by everything, so clearly she’s had experience with all this.

INGS: Exactly. There’s a scene when we’re clay pigeon shooting and Eddie tells Freddy that he’s gonna have to do this chicken dance thing, and it cuts to Wham Tam and you can see how much she’s really enjoying Freddy squirming. I definitely think there’s fun to be had there, for sure.

Does Freddy love his brother? Does he just hope that Eddie will get taken out and he’ll be in charge by default?

INGS: Theo and I had a lot of scenes together and we worked really closely on plotting that relationship, so that however wild things got or however much we pulled the two brothers in this direction or that, there was always a throughline. My mantra with it was that you should feel like either they both love each other or that either one could kill the other, at any point in the show. That would have to be the golden rule.

There’s also the moment when Freddy gets slapped by Eddie. How many times did you have to shoot that? How many times did you have to get slapped by Theo James?

INGS: It’s funny you should bring that up. First of all, that came out of nowhere. Basically, the scene wasn’t working. It was just there. We needed it to drive the plot, but it didn’t really have anything interesting, other than the information that we needed to get across. And Guy had sneakily told Theo, “Just wallop him,” and he did. He caught me right on the ear, which was incredibly painful. It was a bit like the slip up. It was so clear that that’s what we needed and that we couldn’t not do it on the next multiple takes. We probably did five or six, and gradually a huge red mark emerged on my cheek. The director of photography came over and was like, “You know, he really should be slapping him on the other cheek because then he’ll be turning towards the camera.” So then, I had to do another six takes of it. I pretty much had bells ringing in my ears by the end of the day. But it was a good example of something where the scene needed it and the moment needed it. I’m glad that Theo was always so collaborative and we were always able to just trust each other and work that stuff out together.

What Would Daniel Ings Like To See Happen In a Possible Season 2 of ‘The Gentlemen’?

What would you like to see in a possible second season? What would you like to see happen with and to Freddy? What would you personally love to get to explore with him?

INGS: It’s a good question. The trick with these characters is to figure out how to peel away the layers. You can start in a place which is full-on and full throttle, and the audience can form a relationship with a character like that, where they expect chaos or they expect fun. The trick becomes subverting that and surprising audiences, particularly with television. In a 90-minute film, you can really let those larger-than-life characters pop. But as it goes on, the trick is to start to subvert that. I suppose it would be interesting to see what would happen if Freddy didn’t keep losing and if he started winning. Would that be perhaps even more terrifying than Freddy when he’s losing?

How do you figure out what’s next after a character like this? It seems like after you play someone like Freddy, any other character you might ever take will just be boring.

INGS: That’s a good point. I imagine there will be less dressing up as farmyard animals from here on out, although you never know. I seem to have a knack for finding characters who end up being shamed. I was in a series on Netflix called Lovesick, about eight years ago, and my character would take a naked shit in the woods whilst locking eyes with a deer. For some reason, I do seem to pick them, or rather they seem to pick me. Maybe one day soon, I’ll play someone introverted, but I have no idea whether I even could. I could play just a nice, warm guy that everybody likes. I try not to think too strategically about things. I always think about whether it’s a great script and a good story, but also whether I could bring something to it. I genuinely read things and think, “They should get a much better actor than me for this,” or “Can I bring something to it? Is there something in the script where I feel like I have an angle on it or I feel like I have a take on it?”

Even though you really don’t want to like him, there’s something so endearing about Freddy.

INGS: That’s the trick. With a show like this and particularly a character like friendly, you have to think about whether there’s a way that you can make the audience want to spend time with them on screen? Is there a way of convincing the audience that they wanna hang out with them from the safety of their living room while they’re on TV, in spite of the fact that there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that you would wanna hang out with them or be anywhere near them in the real world. That’s the fun of Guy Ritchie, or [Quentin] Tarantino. Even the violence in it is so heightened that it doesn’t really feel like the real world. There’s a level of groundedness there, but that allows for it to be fun. My goal with it was to make Freddy someone who was fun to watch, in spite of the fact that he is a despicable prick.

The Gentlemen is available to stream on Netflix. Check out the trailer:

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