Currently to be found smugging it up as a finance bro on his hols in The White Lotus, Theo James has found another new TV gig. He'll lead the cast for Netflix's small screen adaptation of Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen.
There was chatter back in March about a Netflix show spun off from Ritchie's 2019 gangster action comedy, and it has now come to fruition, with the streaming service handing out a first-season order and Ritchie kicking off shooting the first two episodes in London next week.
The film followed American expat Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey), who built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever, it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him. And around McConaughey, Ritchie built a fun cast that included Colin Farrell, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, Jeremy Strong and Hugh Grant.
For the show, James will be Eddie Halstead, who has inherited his father’s sizeable estate only to discover that it’s sitting on top of a weed empire owned by the legendary Mickey Pearson. Has this straight-up soldier got what it takes to master the dark arts of the British criminal underworld and take control of the entire operation?
Ritchie wrote the pilot script with Matthew Read and, as mentioned, will direct two episodes. Our main concern is that part of the appeal of the film was the gaggle of colourful characters that populated it, but we'll wait and see whether the director has come up with some new criminal weirdoes to surround James.
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