On an early April morning in 2024, I arrive at a gated warehouse in Aberfeldy Village in east London. It’s very windy and noisy on the main road outside, but things on the premises are oddly quiet for the set of one of the more maximalist programmes to emerge from British television this century. Soon enough, I realise that this calm is appropriately deceptive for Sky’s Gangs of London, with all its Machiavellian mobsters and explosive plot twists. It turns out that I have wandered into a cocaine factory.
This set is one of the primary locations for the third season of the blockbuster show. It’s the main base of Elliot Carter (Sope Dirisu), the former undercover cop turned criminal who’s become a major kingpin in the capital’s underground after his war with the now imprisoned Sean Wallace (Joe Cole). The other key members of the Wallace empire, stern matriarch Marian (Michelle Fairley) and Sean’s underestimated brother Billy (Brian Vernel), are on the sidelines but still very much a threat to those who cross their paths.
Both of them deny involvement in the inciting incident that occurs early in this season’s opening episode: a shipment of the cocaine that London’s gangs distribute, which is checked at Elliot’s factory, has been spiked with fentanyl, leading to mass death across one deadly night. A target is now on Elliot’s back, while another is on the gangs in general as London’s new mayor, Simone Thearle (T’Nia Miller), seeks justice for the hundreds of victims.
Meanwhile, a mysterious figure (Andrew Koji) emerges on the scene, with apparent ties to Elliot’s past. With his background in martial arts, Koji proves a worthy addition to a show famed for its fast and furious fight scenes amid all the gangland gunplay, the template for which was laid out by series co-creator Gareth Evans (director of The Raid, 2011 and The Raid 2, 2014) in season one. For a lead director for season three, the producers sought an Asian filmmaking influence. They found South Korean talent Kim Hong-sun, who directs the first two and last two instalments of the eight-episode saga.
Kim’s international breakthrough Project Wolf Hunting (2022) proved an ideal calling card for the gig in terms of both visceral and frightening violence. An action-horror hybrid, the film starts as a prison break thriller set aboard a cargo ship transporting dangerous felons, only to then introduce a more monstrous threat to the escaped criminals than the vessel’s crew. “Season three has a little bit of a horror atmosphere,” Kim tells me before emphasising that the overall tone is still very much like the sprawling crime saga that audiences have previously embraced. “Quite brutal, but more concentrated on the storytelling, character and action.”
“We were looking for the right next step for Gangs,” executive producer Michael Eagle-Hodgson says during a break in filming. “With Gareth [Evans] helming season one and Corin [Hardy] helming season two, we were looking for what would take the show into a slightly different direction [to] help us build out the universe. And in our search, I came across Hong-sun’s fantastic film Project Wolf Hunting and felt it was a perfect fit for the fans from an action perspective. But also, [he] has this unique ability to really ground his characters. We knew that’s what we were looking to do for season three.”
According to Kim, Gangs of London is popular in South Korea, so it seems only fitting that this season’s opening episode features the show’s first significant encounter with the Korean gang of London, one of whom is played by Project Wolf Hunting cast member Lim Ju-hwan.
Fan favourite characters remain at the forefront of the narrative, though, with the return of father and daughter Ed (Lucian Msamati) and Shannon Dumani (Pippa Bennett-Warner); Albanian crime boss and devoted family man Luan (Orli Shuka); Lale (Narges Rashidi), back in London with a vague alibi after her kidnapping by the menacing Asif (Asif Raza Mir); and Algerian siblings Saba (Jahz Armando) and Faz (Fady Elsayed), now members of Elliot’s crew.
I briefly meet Elsayed when he arrives for night-shoot prep towards the end of my time on set, but I get a much better look at one of the season’s noteworthy new characters during my daytime visit: Cornelius Quinn (Richard Dormer), a cunning Irish hood with ties to the Wallace family. Although he fires a fair few shots across the season, Cornelius’s lethal weapon of choice isn’t a gun (or a knife) but instead a blackthorn stick he carries around at all times. When he’s not fiddling with the stick in tense meeting scenes like the one I see filmed, Cornelius can often be found using it to try caving in people’s heads or slashing their throats. “These things can take a lot of thrashing,” Dormer says of the tool, which he apparently requested for his character when joining the show.
Stick-based combat presented new challenges for the season’s supervising stunt coordinator and action unit director Adam Horton, as did the physical status of certain characters after the events of season two. Notably, Billy Wallace, often sharing scenes with Cornelius, got one of his arms severed last time around, something that plays a memorable part in one set piece of season three. “Billy hasn’t really been that aggressive in his previous seasons,” Horton tells me of working with Brian Vernel on action sequences. “It was a chance to break his virginity of killing somebody in a violent manner and see him switch from being this spectator of the gangs and now taking the reins of becoming one of the violent key players. How do we push things with his character that we haven’t seen before?”
Pushing things with the wider ensemble includes a specific implement of death in one episode that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in film or television before – no spoilers, of course. “As Hong-sun has coined,” says Eagle-Hodgson of the season, “it’s a blood opera. The show is always at its best when we are truly with those characters through action sequences, through moments of betrayal and emotion. An opera, in a sense, is something that should [fully] engage you in a character, regardless of language. And Gangs as a whole represents something brutal, emotional and very character-driven.”
All 8 episodes of Gangs of London 3 will launch as a box set on Sky Atlantic and the streaming service NOW from 20 March.
