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[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from season two of The Gentlemen.]

When The Gentlemen first introduced Eddie Horniman (Theo James), he was a reluctant aristocrat who unexpectedly inherited his late father’s dukedom, only to discover that his old man had been involved in a vast weed empire for years. Back then, the dutiful former Army captain was just trying to extricate his family from the criminal enterprise and protect the Halstead country estate. But by the time the dust settles at the end of the newly released second season, Eddie has transformed into a ruthless mob boss in the vein of Michael Corleone.

In the sophomore season of the Guy Ritchie-created action dramedy series, which launched Thursday on Netflix, Eddie and his business partner Susie Glass (Kaya Scodelario) — on the instructions of Susie’s imprisoned crime boss father Bobby (Ray Winstone) — expand their weed operations beyond the U.K. into Italy. The moves puts Eddie and Susie in direct conflict with the elegant but lethal Italian Mafia boss Marco Moretti (Sergio Castellitto) and an ego-driven local fixer named Cico Maldini (Michele Morrone), whose slippery nature ultimately leads to his demise at the hands of Marco’s pet tiger. Yikes!

Wanting to seek more independence, Eddie quietly distances himself from Susie and Bobby to work directly with Marco, even going as far as to carry out a hit on an innocent accountant as a demonstration of his loyalty to their partnership. During that time, Eddie quickly becomes enamored with and marries Marco’s goddaughter, Countess Isabella “Bella” Soranza de Parme (Benedetta Porcaroli) — another aristocrat who understands the dangerous criminal underworld because of her familial connections, but is not personally interested in that lifestyle.

However, Eddie and Bella’s marital bliss is cut short. Following their wedding at Lake Maggiore in episode six, the couple sets off on their honeymoon, with Bella piloting a scenic seaplane alone while Eddie drives along the road below. Tragically, a hidden bomb detonates on the aircraft mid-flight, killing Bella instantly and plunging a devastated Eddie into a quest for vengeance. Although Eddie initially suspects Bobby or other criminal rivals for the attack, the finale reveals that the ultimate betrayal came from within Eddie’s own family.

While staying at a religious rehab center, Eddie’s mercurial older brother, Freddy (Daniel Ings), falls under the spiritual and toxic influence of Gospel John (Pearce Quigley) — the fantastical crime lord who sought revenge on Freddy in season one for killing his brother. Feeding into Freddy’s deep-seated resentment over losing the Halstead inheritance to Eddie, Gospel John convinces Freddy to help orchestrate an armed assault on the Halstead estate, an attack that results in an attempted kidnapping of Eddie and Freddy’s younger sister Charly’s (Jasmine Blackborow) newborn baby in episode seven.

After uncovering Freddy’s complicity, Eddie enlists Susie to help capture Gospel John and wipe out the rest of his syndicate. Eddie then goes to confront Freddy himself — beating him up and even holding a gun to his head. But instead of executing his own flesh and blood, Eddie orders his traumatized brother into the back of a black van, where Gospel John is tied up and another man is holding a chainsaw. “Someone’s gotta die, Freddy,” Eddie tells him. To save his own life, Freddy is forced to behead Gospel John. The season concludes with a blood-soaked Freddy holding the severed head, while Eddie lights a cigar and coldly calls his brother a “good boy.”

Eddie’s descent into an unhinged crime lord was particularly appealing to James, who has long been interested in examining the corruptibility of power among the most privileged. “It often happens with kings or leaders of religious cults,” James tells The Hollywood Reporter in the conversation below. “They kind of start off in a version of trying to help, but by the end, power degrades their sense of self so much that they become poisoned by it and become numb to violence and everything that happens around them.”

Calling in from London earlier this week, star and co-executive producer James opened up to THR about collaborating with Ritchie on a thematically deeper and darker second season (and how that shocking ending sets up the already renewed season three), why he thinks an Eddie-Susie romance may never be in the cards — and, yes, the rumored casting of the real-life Duchess of Sussex.

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What kinds of creative conversations did you have with Guy Ritchie to figure out how you all wanted to evolve the story in season two?

After season one, and honestly while I was doing it, I felt we had a great conceit, a really good story and some great actors, but there were perhaps depths that we hadn’t yet plumbed. With] season one, there’s a world where [the story’s] kind of wrapped up. So if you’re going to go back for a second bite of the apple, the reason is to try and make it better and more complex, take bigger swings and learn from the things that worked from season one and evolve as much as possible.

The methodology with Guy and [executive producer] Matthew [Read] and I is a pretty complex one, but good in the sense that there are a lot of conversations. We start with a sitdown in London, and we have a four-hour conversation that ranges from everything from the existential to the minutiae. But we start with an initial big-picture chat. We don’t solve everything in that single chat, but we start thinking about the larger themes.

But the ability to understand Eddie a bit more, to have him be challenged, to have him have more emotional depth, to have him fall in love, to have him broken both spiritually and physically, and then have him completely betrayed — those were the touch points we started with and then carried on developing. It’s a unique process — one I have never done in another job — in that we are tinkering in the trailer in the morning and during the scene, so it’s an ever-evolving process.

You have spoken in the past about how Eddie was very much on the back foot in the first season. He was not exactly a fish out of water, but he was still trying to get his bearings in this criminal enterprise that his father was involved in. This season, he seems to really embrace and almost become seduced by the promises and trappings of wealth that he was born into — and he is left to wrestle with the cost of his actions. How do you think his moral compass bends over the course of the season? Do you think he believes the end justifies the means?

I think he believes that the end ultimately justifies the means. What I was interested in exploring is a story of ascension — like some of the great stories and the classic stories, from biblical to Walter White — and what cost that incurs on a person. In season one, in many ways, he’s a moral man. He’s a civilian adapting to scenarios on the back foot and being thrown into a world he doesn’t understand with a bunch of characters who are larger than life. His job is to navigate through it and come out the other end with an ability to save his family from the clutches of poverty and villainy. [But] what happens is, he realizes he’s fairly adept at it.

What I wanted to do in season two is to take a man filled with privilege because of multiple centuries of landed gentry — and what that [familial background] gives him is ego and entitlement. There’s an ascension story where he thinks [rising to a higher state of power] should be granted to him because he thinks it’s his kind of right. That’s a kind of ego story, and also a kingship story. That’s a story that Guy’s interested, in too.

In terms of playing with morality, episode two is the moment he steps over the edge and commits a crime to ostensibly an innocent man for his own means. He justifies it as the end justifies the means for him, but ultimately it has corroded some of his moral purity. He’s a good person and now he’s far from it, and that is going to weigh on his conscience for the rest of the season.

But what I also like playing with — and this is all within the caveat of entertaining in a slightly heightened world, so not to be too portentous about it, but [I’m interested in] privilege, power and the idea that there’s an apathy and an erosion of empathy that comes with that. It often happens with kings or leaders of religious cults. They kind of start off in a version of trying to help, but by the end, power degrades their sense of self so much that they become poisoned by it and become numb to violence and everything that happens around them. We’re going to do another season, and in that season I want to continue exploring that: How far has he lost himself, and how much has he corroded his soul?

One of the people who remarks just how much Eddie has changed is Susie. Multiple characters start to question the nature of Eddie and Susie’s relationship — whether their connection is purely platonic and professional, or something more. How consciously have you, Kaya and the rest of the creative team tried to play up the will-they-won’t-they of that relationship?

Our touching point in the beginning was always Moonlighting — Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis — and the idea of two people who kind of are in love, but never quite get together. That’s a baseline. But in season two, we like the idea that they’re connected, but their distance is one of mistrust. On one hand, they’re the other’s greatest ally. But they are also heading to a path where one of them has to usurp the other because we’re talking about a kind of ascension story and how that’s going to happen, and who’s going to fail and who’s going to win.

Then beyond that, I think the realities of an indentured Duke and then peer of the realm getting with a gangster’s daughter who runs a criminal empire is pretty unlikely. (Laughs.) There’s a sadness [to the relationship] because maybe they would, but ultimately they probably never can.

Eddie’s relationship with Susie briefly takes a back seat to his unexpected romance with an Italian countess named Bella. Eddie and Bella quickly get married, which helps strengthen Eddie’s standing in his expanding international operations, but she is killed instantly when a bomb explodes on the seaplane that she was piloting on her way to her and Eddie’s honeymoon. How did you think about playing Eddie’s reaction to her death?

I like that storyline. It touches on what’s happened for centuries in European aristocracy and nobility. People marry strategically — they marry for alliance, they marry for land mass, for power. This [show] has got a modern touch on that. Is he marrying to consolidate his power? Yes. But is he marrying for love? Of course. He’s also from landed gentry, from aristocracy, so he’s seen that world of being presented a marriage for reasons beyond love, for one’s strategy. I think ultimately he does kind of fall in love with her, but perhaps he doesn’t expect to.

In terms of the ending [of episode six], we actually shot a bunch of [versions]. Eddie sees what’s happened, and there’s an aftermath. Guy wanted a bit more mystery, so we don’t understand where he is or what’s happening to him until the end of episode seven — and then he starts this story of ultimate revenge fueled by anger.

That’s the fun as well of being able to do a third season. He’s betrayed by his brother [who was involved in Bella’s killing]. He loses his wife on his wedding day, but he also ascends to a higher place of power, so he’s going to be more ruthless and deadly. And at what point is the barrier between a vaguely good person or a complete monster? Kaya’s character says that she thinks he’s evolving into something else, and I think that’s fun territory to be in.

The ending of the season feels particularly shocking.

That was something we had talked about with Guy and Matthew for a long time. He can’t murder his brother straight up and straight out because then he loses his family, but he has to have some semblance of revenge. So that [ending] came from trying to figure out: How do you do both in one? How do you punish him without killing him? [We settled on] forcing [Freddy] to do the most atrocious crime and also removing the head of his God in a way. He looks up to this man as a man of faith and then he has to fucking chainsaw his head off. (Laughs.)

Earlier in the finale, Eddie’s own mother, Sabrina (Joely Richardson), remarks that he has become almost unrecognizable to her. What does that tell you about where he’s going — and where the story will go — in season three?

From an audience perspective, I think he’s beginning to wander into territory of rich and problematic darkness and moral quandary. But in terms of the reality of his family, he’s just about saved himself because he hasn’t had to murder his own brother, and he’ll be able to still remain a semblance of himself.

Ultimately, he’s on a path to surpass Bobby [as a drug lord], but also get complete vengeance from his brother. How that enacts itself is still in the process [of being determined]. But on top of that, I think we’re going to expand the world further. We’ll be touching on lots of different countries and new countries. I won’t spoil it because it’s a big part of the storyline, but we’ll be in a very different cinematic planet, shall we say.

The Gentlemen was officially renewed for season three last week, but you and your creative team had reportedly known about the renewal for a while. Do you know when you will begin production for the next season? Are you going to be filming later this year or early next year?

Yeah, pretty soon. It’s very soon to the point where I’m like, “Fuck, we need to really get this shit together before we start filming.” (Laughs.) So, yes, it’s happening very soon because I think we’re also cognizant of the fact that nowadays you don’t want massive lulls. There was a large break between season one and two, and I think we don’t want to be in that position again. That happened because people were available and then they weren’t. Then I did a film, then Guy would do a film, and [schedules didn’t align]. But I think we’re all aligned with the fact that if we want to keep momentum and also just tell the story and finish the story, then we should leave less of a gap between the seasons.

The show has obviously made headlines in the last couple of weeks because of the potential casting of a certain real-life duchess, Meghan Markle, in season three. As both a star and a producer, how privy are you to those kinds of casting conversations, and what do you know about her involvement at this point?

I think that’s mostly hot air. To me, it’s fascinating how [those reports] exploded that much, and how intrigued people are, and how much kind of cultural significance [Meghan and Harry] have. I guess it’s inevitable in some way. We talk about casting all the time, but, I mean, the practicalities of that are also complex for a show like ours. Can you imagine the amount of attention, paparazzi, and so forth you’d have? So I would say it’s pretty unlikely.

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The first two seasons of The Gentlemen are now streaming on Netflix.

A drama dotted with laughs (or a comedy blotted with pain?) in which everyday problems are confronted, and avoided, over steaming cuppas and brimming glasses of white wine, Tender Loving Care explores friendship, family dynamics and England’s fraying social safety net. In other words, it’s a Mike Leigh film, and a lovely one at that.

If it ends up being his last, as the 83-year-old writer-director has indicated, it’s a fitting and stealthily powerful way to go out — a low-key mic drop of sorts. The movie is warm and inviting, filled with giggles and gossip and gentle gallows humor; it’s also wrenching, with a topical urgency simmering just beneath the jovial surface. While Leigh’s left-wing politics inform the story, the filmmaker, unlike his contemporary Ken Loach, mostly avoids playing ventriloquist; the chit-chatting, chortling, sobbing, seething souls who populate his work tend to be too complicated, too insistently human to serve as mere spokespeople for their creator’s ideas.

In Tender Loving Care, those ideas concern compassion, solidarity and support — what it means to look out for one another at this (angry, angering) point in history, specifically in a country whose public services have been eroded by an ethos of self-reliance codified by Thatcher and further cemented, or perverted, by Brexit. As is often the case in Leigh’s films, the thematic framework is conspicuous; characters, on occasion, turn subtext into text, delivering mini-disquisitions on the failures of the state and the isolation of urban life today.

Those statements might register as distractingly didactic if they didn’t sound wholly believable coming out of these particular people’s mouths; two of the four central figures, childhood BFFs Amy (Kate O’Flynn, Widow’s Bay scene-stealer) and Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), are overextended, underappreciated social workers — and seasoned compartmentalizers, lest the despondency they witness daily on the job pull them under.

Amy and Rosie, as well as Amy’s kindly parents Birdie (Marion Bailey, Leigh’s longtime partner) and Geoff (Paul Jesson), arrive onscreen fully formed, alive with personal and relational histories we can intuit beyond what’s in the frame. If it feels like we’ve known these folks forever — from Amy and Rosie’s mutual hype sessions to Birdie and Geoff’s puttering and banter — that’s a credit to Leigh’s legendary rehearsal process, during which he and his actors build the characters from scratch through weeks of improvisation and discussion.

Nothing and everything happens over the course of Tender Loving Care. Unceremoniously dumped by a boyfriend who’s gone back to his wife and child, Amy moves in with single-and-mingling Rosie. Birdie frets about Amy’s romantic and reproductive prospects, though she and Geoff console themselves with their certainty that she’s better off sans her ex. Amy and Rosie endure stressful days on the job (Amy works mainly with children, Rosie with the elderly), retreating to their flat in the evenings to swap horror stories or decompress over girl talk, dance-offs and other bursts of booze-infused silliness. Geoff’s health takes a sudden turn for the worse.

The tone here is mellower, the pitch less heightened than in Leigh’s more volatile domestic tragicomedies, like Secrets & Lies and Life Is Sweet, to say nothing of the bludgeoning All or Nothing. That’s in large part a reflection of the new film’s main quartet, who sit at the opposite end of the temperamental spectrum from Pansy, the ferocious protagonist of Leigh’s previous effort, 2024’s Hard Truths. Amy, Rosie, Birdie and Geoff are indeed among the most amiable characters Leigh has ever created, their darker feelings — loneliness, jealousy, rage, dread — tucked safely beneath chipper smiles and cheerful pleasantries.

But Leigh has never been one to flinch at life’s cruelties. The simplicity of Tender Loving Care’s narrative, the sweetness of the people it portrays, and the ticklish good vibes they generate belie a toughmindedness about both the private disappointments and the larger societal injustices that shake our respective worlds. When moments of anguish arrive — a neighbor’s tormented account of her husband’s funeral; a tirade by a paranoia-gripped hoarder Rosie is assigned to visit; a hard-drinking mother’s fury at the foster care system for which Amy is assessing her — they have a rawness and force that slice right through the movie’s congeniality.

The film is in direct conversation with Hard Truths, as well as Leigh standouts Another Year and Happy-Go-Lucky, in its consideration of what determines happiness — the degrees to which choice, disposition, luck and broader structural or socioeconomic forces play a part. Like so much of Leigh’s work, Tender Loving Care ponders how people of different circumstances and constitutions coexist: how we make each other feel and act, how our perception of each other’s lives shapes our perception of our own.

It’s also about how we proceed with the business of living amid hardships both mundane and momentous. Like Ozu, a clear influence, Leigh is one of the medium’s great observers of human behavior, from the small talk that drowns out the terror of our worst anxieties to the self-delusions that sustain us during our most vulnerable moments to the way we accept or refuse help — the latter sometimes misguidedly. “I can’t put it on them,” Amy tells Rosie, explaining her reluctance to let her parents know of her break-up. Like all the film’s principals, Amy is an expert practitioner of Britain’s famed stiff upper lip, but here she’s sparing Birdie and Geoff a burden they’re more than ready to share.

O’Flynn is an expressive marvel, her kooky lightheartedness periodically clouding over with a melancholy that cuts to the bone. The swirl of conflicting emotions that play out across Amy’s face as she gulps champagne while listening to her mother reminisce about her courtship with Geoff is astonishing — a piercing pantomime of the oft-cited notion that millennials are the first generation to have fewer opportunities than their parents.

Bailey Johnson, a casual charisma bomb, makes Rosie so radiant and grounded and fun that you may realize only late in the film — when she reveals she no longer speaks to her own mom and dad — that her generosity toward the other characters is more symbiotic than selfless. Rosie is the very definition of a ride-or-die, but she needs Amy and her family as much as they need her.

The beautifully synced Bailey and Jesson, meanwhile, offer a duet of endearments, confidences, worries and innocuous shit-talk, conjuring the ineffable mix of intimacy and distance that makes a long-term marriage. When the rhythm of their relationship is disrupted in the film’s second half, the effect is devastating.

Visually, Tender Loving Care is characterized by Leigh’s typical unfussiness, with Lucy Bristow taking over DP duties from frequent Leigh collaborator Dick Pope, who died in 2024. As usual, there’s mastery in how the filmmaker uses facial close-ups to add notes of tension, encouraging the viewer to locate truths undisclosed by the dialogue. Ditto in how he deploys a single overhead shot — serene but conspicuous — to foreshadow an unlucky swerve in the story.  

A touching penultimate scene feels like a natural conclusion to this portrait of people devotedly closing ranks when crisis strikes. But Leigh doesn’t stop there, instead punctuating his film with a final image of uncommon bluntness and despair. At first impression, it seems an incongruously — if not unjustifiably — hopeless way to go out. Yet given the dogged humanism that is the throughline of Leigh’s extraordinary filmography, perhaps a less pessimistic reading is due: Leigh is ending his movie, possibly his career, with a plea for individuals to lift up those they know and love, of course, but also to fight for a society that lifts up those they don’t.

The 53rd Telluride Film Festival got underway on Friday with its annual Patron Brunch, a gathering of the fest’s biggest-name talent and highest-dollar supporters, followed by the annual Patron Preview, a screening of one of the fest’s most anticipated titles.

Among the big names on hand for the brunch were Elsinore star Andrew Scott, The Debut director Jesse Eisenberg and star Julianne Moore, The Man I Love star Rami Malek, Wild Horse Nine stars John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, Ink director Danny Boyle and star Jack O’Connell, Fatherland and Rose star Sandra Hüller, Avedon director Ron Howard and Léa Seydoux, star of a record-breaking three fest films, Alpha Gang, Gentle Monster and The Unknown.

A large contingent of the Club Kid team were also present, including director/star Jordan Firstman, stars Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva and scene-stealer Colleen Camp, who many know for hosting swanky awards season shindigs of her own.

Tender Loving Care’s legendary writer/director Mike Leigh, who is 83 and in fragile health, was not able to make it to this year’s fest, but his film is being represented here by its entire principal cast, save for Kate O’Flynn. Leigh was present, in a way, via “A Film by Mike Leigh” hats that Tender Loving Care distributor Bleecker Street handed out to brunch attendees.

Some who were at the brunch, like Boyle, are festival regulars — he previously was here with Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and Steve Jobs. Others, such as Moore, had gone decades since their last visit — she said she was last here in 1994 with Vanya on 42nd Street. And, surprisingly enough, a few veteran makers of high-quality films were at the fest for the first time — among them, the legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, here as part of the team behind the not-yet-completed animated film Wildwood, clips of which are being shown at the fest.

The Ink and Wild Horse Nine teams were still acclimating to the high altitude after flying in directly from Venice, where their films were greeted with lengthy standing ovations. They, like most other talent at the fest, will have little time to rest or watch movies, as the fest’s official Q&As and panels, and adjacent press opportunities, will consume most of their waking hours. Eisenberg lamented to THR about being so close to screenings of so many top-notch movies, but not having time to see them. Elsinore’s Scott, however, said he would try to see as many of the “gay movies” at this year’s fest as possible, citing La Bola Negra, Club Kid and A Long Winter as top priorities.

The belles of the ball, or at least two of them, were “Los Javis,” the exes who co-directed La Bola Negra, for which they were honored at Cannes, and which is Netflix’s primary contender this season. Speaking of Netflix, the streamer held a listening party late Thursday night celebrating its documentary feature The Disciple, which is about the Wu-Tang-Clan’s infamous Once Upon a Time in Shaolin album. Only one copy of the album was ever produced, and it has rarely been played, but an arrangement was strucky whereby it was blasted at this cool gathering.

The first big screening at the fest is always the Patron Preview, the title of which is not revealed until festivalgoers are seated inside the Werner Herzog Theatre. This year, it turned out to be Wild Horse Nine, hot off its world premiere in Venice. The film is screening now, and it will screen again on Saturday night at the Palm Theatre, after which THR will moderate an on-stage Q&A with McDonagh, Malkovich, Rockwell, supporting actors Steve Buscemi and Mariana di Girolamo and producer Graham Broadbent.