Guy Ritchie has made a career out of creating characters who are spectacularly bad at making sensible decisions, but few have embraced the art of self-destruction quite like Freddy Horniman. Played by Daniel Ings in Netflix‘s The Gentlemen, the deeply troubled aristocrat has spent two seasons making life considerably more difficult for his younger brother, Eddie, while finding increasingly inventive ways to ruin his own.
Speaking to HATC Magazine in an interview published on October 19, however, Ings confirmed that he will not return for Season 3 of The Gentlemen. Ings, who stars opposite Theo James as Eddie Horniman, admitted that he was satisfied with Freddy’s final chapter, after a character re-design in Season 2.
“I’m not in the next one. So that’s a fun sense of closure. I kind of see it as closure for the character in a way; it just ends as this wild, broken, crazy, you know. I don’t know, probably mumbling into the ether somewhere in the British countryside.”
Ings also explained the evolution of the character was down to Ritchie wanting a more dramatic tone, veering away from the more broad comedy of the first season of the series. As he explains, the filmmaker approached him at the beginning of production on Season 2 and explained that they needed to reconsider the character’s direction.
“It was a lot of fun. Really, it was a great experience. I’ll always be grateful to have played a part in creating that character. I absolutely loved playing Freddy. When that storyline was presented to me for series two, he was written almost as a completely different character. And part of that was that I think Guy wanted to move away from the humour of it. He sat me down on my first day on the second series and was like, we went too far with the humour; we got to pull it back. So that was part of it was really interesting to kind of thread that needle.”
Daniel Ings Says ‘The Gentlemen’ Was Constantly Changing Behind the Scenes
The actor also reflected on the unusual creative process behind the Netflix series, revealing that Ritchie‘s approach frequently involved rewriting scenes and encouraging improvisation, and that meant constantly adapting their performances while maintaining the complicated relationship between the Horniman brothers.
“In a way, that character really went on a big old journey, and the way that Guy Ritchie works is that he kind of throws the script out on the morning, and so you’re really putting a lot of yourselves as performers into those characters and helping build the momentum of a scene, ad-libbing and improvising and all this kind of stuff. Or he’ll rewrite the script and give you brand new pages.”
Ings explained that the evolving scripts made it particularly challenging to maintain consistency across the series, especially as different directors took over individual episodes.
“So that was a constant sort of evolution of surprise because you couldn’t even really rely on the scripts that you were given. They came in sort of two at a time. So we shot the first two episodes of series one with Guy, and then new directors would come in. We’d get these new drafts, and that was a sort of constantly evolving process, and it was a real challenge to find the through-lines with the characters, and particularly for me and Theo, who plays the lead in it, we had this kind of dynamic of a brotherly conflict that we had to really track through all of these evolving plotlines and storylines, and we learned a huge amount.”
Despite those challenges, Ings believes Freddy’s departure came at the right moment, allowing the character to evolve rather than simply repeat the same mistakes.
“It was a fun way to kind of cap off the character. You don’t want to keep playing the same game with the audience of this guy kind of comedically messing things up for them. So it was an interesting challenge to take him in a different direction at the end. I thought it was fun.”
The Gentlemen is streaming now on Netflix, with a third season expected to continue the story.
via Collider