In the first episode of Guy Ritchie’s new Netflix series “The gentlemen”, a British aristocrat is forced to dress up in a chicken suit and dance on camera with the glee of a gangster he owes money to. He waves his arms wildly, thrusts his head forward, and bawls at the top of his voice as tears roll down his face.
The man in the suit is Daniel Ings, an actor whose face people may recognize more than his name. He’s best known for his role as Luke, a lovable female singer in the sitcom Lovesick, but he’s also appeared in many other TV roles that fit a certain archetype: the charming, stylish Brit who’s a bit of a cad.
In ‘The Crown’, he played a rogue friend of Prince Philip. He was the unreliable father of Dr.’s baby. Jean Milburn in “Sex Education” and the resentful husband in “I Hate Suzie” by Lucy Prebble.
“I should probably show some range at some point,” Ings, 38, joked in a recent interview at a London hotel. But he enjoyed playing “the sassy pill,” he said, and the challenge of transforming characters who, on paper, seem quite unlikely into engaging screen presences. When Ings reads a script that frames his prospective role as a bad, he said, thinking, “I bet I can find something childish, something fun in there.”
To play Freddy in “The Gentlemen,” Ings brought that approach to what may be his most reprehensible character to date. Arrogant, drug-addled eldest son of a duke, Freddy, is handed over his father’s will in favor of his younger brother, Eddie (Theo James), who discovers organized criminals running a massive weed farm beneath the family estate.
As Eddie tries to get his family safely out of the underworld, Freddy creates chaos. It was essential to the plot, Ings said, that viewers feel some of the affection Eddie has for his “stupid brother” so they can understand when Eddie makes uncomfortable deals with gangsters to protect Freddy and pay off the his debt.
Although Ings has made a career out of playing top class British crooks, his own background is a bit different. He went to a private school in England, but his family was lower-middle class, he said, and he learned to play posh by observing his classmates. “It’s something I know from watching it, and I can do it ironically,” he said. Although many of his characters are lotharios, Ings has been in a relationship with his wife since they were teenagers.
An Ings performance is a balancing act between careful attention to what he calls “the rhythm of the dialogue” and natural improvisation, in which he lets loose and makes himself ridiculous. Filming ‘The Gentlemen’ gave Ings the opportunity for both. For a scene in which Freddy learns from his father’s will that he won’t get the inheritance he expects, Ings said he carefully prepared his lines of angry dialogue. But Ritchie, the episode’s director, gave him free rein, take after take, Ings added, to see where the scene might take him. “There was a chance for a flush,” Ings said, smiling.
Ritchie said in an emailed statement that the opportunity to develop Eddie and Freddy’s story over the course of eight hour-long episodes was “extremely liberating,” compared to the constraints of a 2020 film, also called “The Gentlemen’, which he had done with a similar plot.
Ings’ characters – including Freddy – are often loud, quirky and physically expressive. The actor himself spoke exuberantly with his hands and swore a lot. “On the one hand, it’s very English,” said Johnny Flynn, who co-starred with Ings in “Lovesick,” “but in terms of his energy, it’s more of an American comedy vibe.”
Ings has cited actors such as Vince Vaughn and Robin Williams as his heroes. His dream role, he said, would be something similar to Williams on “Mork and Mindy,” a sitcom that premiered in the late ’70s in which Williams played an alien navigating life on Earth. Williams would “come in and just improvise these crazy lines and physical comedy, or jump around the set,” Ings said.
Although Ings seemed happy in his luxurious position, he said that if he were to branch out, he would like to be more involved in the theater. He hasn’t been on stage since 2013, when he provided comic relief as Porter in a London production of “Macbeth” — though he was uninterested for a year, in the West End. “I know I’d be bored,” he said, “and you can’t improvise on stage – unless you’re Mark Rylance.”
Ultimately, the show “has to be fun for the audience and fun for the community of people who were there the day they did it,” Ings said. “Bring back ‘Mork and Mindy,’ you know what I mean?”