Maxance Vincent
“Don’t prepare anything. Just turn up, be present, focused, and…dress up as a chicken,” are the words actor Daniel Ings lived by when it came to playing Freddy Horniman, the always-unpredictable but insanely attachable and funny sibling to Theo James‘ Eddie in Netflix’s The Gentlemen.
Ings grew up loving the work of Guy Ritchie, through Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, so much that he tells Awards Radar on a Zoom that it’s now become a part of his DNA. But there was something different in Ritchie’s approach to The Gentlemen that he hadn’t seen before in his filmography that immediately made his character appealing to him:
“Aristocracy is such an important part of this show, and there was a sort of comedic, wild man element to [the character] that I felt I could bring something I hadn’t seen in his movies.”
In working with Ritchie on shaping such a fun and unpredictable character, Ings himself said the shooting experience was unpredictable, as the filmmaker likes to throw out the script on the day of shooting and come up with something completely different than what was on the page. This gave the actor an obvious clue in adapting to Ritchie’s directorial style:
“On set, Guy would say, “Come on, come up with something. Say something funny. No, that’s not funny, something else.” The clue there was writ large: this is gonna be f–king wild. And it was.
As actors, you always do bits of planning and try to wing it a little bit because you never know what everyone else will bring to the set, particularly with comedy. I try not to be too rigid in my thinking, but I’ll do prep. In this one, it became clear that I couldn’t prepare anything. I know the world of Guy Ritchie, and like I say, it’s in my DNA.
But the weird thing with the way Guy works is that sometimes it’s free, loose, and completely improvisational. He’s shouting stuff out and standing by the monitors trying things out. Other times, he is rigidly specific with the delivery of his dialogue, and he’ll hand you a speech two seconds before you go and film it, and you can’t change a word.”
This “free and loose” improvisational style Ritchie adopts led to the series’ very best scene, in which Freddy has to record an apology video to Tommy Dixon (Peter Serafinowicz) while dressed as a chicken. This scene perfectly represents how Ritchie shapes his sequences through the edit, letting the actors be as loose as they can on set and constructing the scene in the editing room.
There were many moving parts to how the scene was shot, but Ings jokingly states, “The most difficult thing was figuring out how to pee in that chicken costume. Because you have to get the whole thing off, and I’m just walking around in tights and a vest. It was the dead of winter, and I was out on a quad bike. That definitely was a hold-it-in type of situation.”
As funny as that may be, becoming a chicken required lots of improvisation from him. In filming this iconic sequence, Ings recalls the moments he was in the bathroom and recorded many instances of Freddy getting into character, which was all improvised and ultimately served how the entire setpiece, which ends the first episode, was edited in the finished product:
“I’m outside hammering rails of coke, and the whole thing is just sort of built up gradually. All that stuff in the bathroom where Freddy’s just psyching himself up was all improvised. I remember I had the chicken hat on, and they put a line of cocaine there on the mirror. I was like, “You know what? We should give the chicken his own line. He should rack up a for the beak.” What I love about the scene is that [the editors] put so much of that stuff in. When I watched it, I was like, “Oh, my God, I can’t believe they used it.””
Ings also collaborated closely with Theo James, on building the brotherly relationship between Freddy and Eddie. Freddy’s brother, unbeknownst to him, becomes the Duke of Halstead, per his father’s (Edward Fox) dying wishes, and gets involved in the criminal operations of Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario), who has been secretly growing cannabis on Halstead’s grounds.
In ensuring the bond between the two brothers remains strong throughout the series, Ings explains that he “always felt like a big part of the story’s core was believing that there was love between [the two brothers] and massive resentment.
We worked quite closely together, trying to find moments where our characters would be having an argument in a certain way or do something different with the scene we were working on. Maybe we have to lighten it up a bit, or this should be a scene where my character is kind of stripped bare and honest. We regularly called and texted each other to send ideas back and forth and tried to build that ourselves. We had known each other a bit beforehand, and I think there was an inherent trust there that allowed us to [build that bond].”
Recalling his favorite parts working on the show, Ings admits that he and his co-stars Theo James, Kaya Scodelario, Vinnie Jones, Joely Richardson, and Chanel Cresswell were first terrified of the challenge of working on such a show but quickly found how enjoyable it was working with one another:
“We were all terrified that we were out of our depths. I’m like, “Have I just burned my career to the ground with this with this insane performance that I’m giving?”
I think we all realized that everybody found each other incredibly funny and that we all were really enjoying it. There was a sense of nervous giddiness throughout the show. There’s a bit in the party sequence, which is so minuscule when you see it back with the Irish travelers. That was a whole thing – they put music on, and we were going around drawing on each other and pouring booze over each other. It was all real booze. And I think that this collective ensemble, this company of actors, where everyone was looking out for each other and egging each other on, is what I will always remember.”
You can check out my full interview with Daniel below and stream all episodes of The Gentlemen on Netflix today:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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