GANGS OF LONDON
The City is Torn Apart In a Power Struggle
The Raid director Gareth Evans wasn’t out to make a run-of-the-mill gangster series with Gangs of London co-creator Matt Flannery. Instead, he wanted to remove the generic brawling and show what happens.
“There’s been so many cockney crime gangster films and TV shows that have covered this stuff over the last ten, twenty, thirty years,” Evans told Entertainment Weekly. “Me and Matt used to say to each other, ‘Let’s avoid all those cliches, let’s not have Cockney gangsters in this thing, let’s have it be about lots of different diverse cultures, let’s do away with the conventions of the genre.’ But then, when it came to our first action scene, we were like, we should tackle this head-on, the first fight scene should be in a typical London boozer, but let’s show our version of what that is.”
Gangs of London, which premiered earlier this year in the UK on SkyTV, makes its American debut on AMC. The drama opens with the killing of London’s most famous crime boss leader. Through that, it demonstrates how the international gang wars affect the world at large. The series stars Peaky Blinders actor Joe Cole, Colm Meaney, Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, Lucian Msamati, and Pippa Bennett-Warner, whose character is a much-needed female presence in a male-dominated genre.
“She’s very independent, motivated,” Bennett-Warner said. “She runs her own interior design business that operates alongside the Wallace organization. I always describe her as sitting in an ivory tower. She’s Daddy’s princess, but she’s definitely not without her own steel. I was so happy to get it. I was ready to do something action-based.”
Action-based it is with fight scenes that will make your head spin. Fans of The Raid will know it as Evans’ signature style. The series is based on the 2006 Sony PSP game of the same name. If you need a mob show to fill that Peaky Blinders-shaped hole in your TV schedule, look no further than Gangs of London.
