Maxance Vincent
When Mandeep Dhillon landed the role of Seraphina Harrigan in the Paramount+ television series MobLand, she had only watched The Gentlemen series prior to her experience working with director Guy Ritchie, as she explains to Awards Radar on Zoom:
“While we were filming, I watched Snatch, but I was always one of those people, famously, who had never watched any gangster stuff. I started going down a whole gangster tunnel before I even auditioned for the role, but it was more stuff like American Gangster The Godfather and Scarface. I’ve got more of Guy Ritchie’s stuff to to watch, although I’m quite happy that I didn’t watch all of it and I wasn’t such a fan, because I think that would have affected how I turned up to work.”
When she read the screenplay, the actor was most struck about how “powerful of a woman Seraphina was, and she doesn’t take shit. That was really exciting for me. The dynamic in the family, because she’s sort of the outcast, was a really fun position to play. Getting to go head to head against Helen Mirren was so much fun. She’s amazing as Maeve.”
In working with Guy Ritchie for the first two episodes, Dhillon explained that “you have no idea what’s going to happen when you turn up to work. Obviously, you’ve got the script, and I know what scene I’m filming today. However, I remember one day, it was the cafe scene. The whole scene got changed on the day, like. They came to me and said, “Guy wants to see you and Daniel Betts in his trailer.”
I got to the trailer, the most amazing trailer, by the way. Inside, I was like “What the fuck is this?” There was a wood fire going, fresh bread cut. It felt very Guy, which was the best way to describe it. You didn’t feel like you were in a trailer.
He said to us, “Let’s rewrite the scene.” We all sat down and rewrote this scene. Then he said, “We’ll start with a wide. By the time we get to close-ups, you’ll know the lines.” Literally, you walk from the trailer to the cafe, and I’m saying the lines we wrote. What that does is keep everything alive and electric. You don’t have time to get into your head, you’re just present, and I think that’s when the best moments happen.”
This made the experience “more exciting, because it was so early on. I got the role, then two weeks later, I’m on set filming. It was a very quick turnaround. It enabled me to decide for myself how I wanted Seraphina to be, but it was so fun.. I’ve worked in the past with Ricky Gervais, and we do a lot of improv. It didn’t feel like “Oh, my God, I can’t do this.” It felt like it would be a fun shoot.”
Of course, there was much more to unpack regarding Seraphina’s arc in this incredible series, and all of it can be found in our full discussion below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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