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After a week of glamour, ceremony and royal humiliation courtesy of the latest season of A crownthe capital of Britain will now be bathed in blood and guts again.
This is the second time Gangsters of Londona series of violent crimes started by A raid writer/director Gareth Evans and produced by Pulse Films and Sister, has arrived on AMC+, holding the guts of the first outing in 2021 and able to increase the number of eyes – and the body count – one more time.
Ṣọpẹ Dịrìsu returns to the main role as former team player turned undercover cop Elliot Finch, now forced to work as a stand-in for the shadowy group of billionaires known as the Investors, while most of them are (still alive) mob bosses from season 1 back. fighting for control of London’s criminal network.
But there’s a new – terrifying – addition to the mix in Koba, a Georgian drug kingpin and arms dealer brought in to restore order. Sporting peroxide blond hair and an OTT wardrobe (think shiny velor tracksuits, colorful shirts and excessive amounts of chest hair), Koba – played by Arab-American actor Waleed Zuaiter – It’s definitely a great new antagonist on TV screens this year; a ruthless, unpredictable, rational and controlling peacock who sees the city as his for the taking and has no qualms about breaking unwritten gang codes and targeting the families of his rivals to scare them into submission.
For Zuaiter, who was recently seen on television on Hulu’s very popular Baghdad Centralbut a long list of credits include A house of cards, London has fallen and an Oscar-nominated feature Omar (who reproduced), Koba was a complete break from the norm, a rare opportunity to enter the shoes (in this case, sneakers) of a completely different person.
As he explains The Hollywood Reporternot only that Koba was not from the Middle East (Zuaiter refused the request to make the character his nationality, Palestine), but he was a unique character that he could pour his own creativity (the hair was his idea) and really fun with.
He’s played bad guys before, but they’ve been more devious than out and out scary like Koba. How did your role come about?
When I went to London Baghdad Central The premiere in 2020, my reps set up meetings with different directors and producers, and one of them was with Kelly Valentine Hendry, who was casting gangs. Apparently, he was thinking of me for Koba’s role in that meeting.
What on Earth did you do at the meeting!?
No! I think it’s because I told him I would die to play something different. Baghdad Central it was really big in the sense that it was this heroic Arab character, which you rarely see. But I said I want to do more of what I’m trained to do as an actor, which is to just get outside of yourself and explore and learn and challenge yourself. And then, when I got the shows, I was blown away. They were shows you could really sink your teeth into.
Was Koba fully developed when you got the role or were you able to build him without you?
Kind of both. I have about three quarters of a character sheet. This terrible place for him was very clear to me in this one sentence where it said that Koba knows in his head whether he is a victim or a victim. And so he was one step ahead of his enemies. And to me, that was like the first definition of him. But then, right after that, he was a foodie, and he was very interested in the cuisine of London. So it was very clear to me that he was something else, and he was seen as a character that we were supposed to enjoy. I fed that and then continued to feed it, and the designers were very open to my ideas.
What were your suggestions?
The first was that this character is so different from me that I want to look different physically. During the first shutdown of the disease, my wife said, “Listen, we are not leaving the house for a while, I want you to shave my head.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll shave your head if you dye my hair blond.” That’s how I got blonde. I did this before I got it Gangsters audit. But then I had to color it again, because I had to read it Oslo. I was a guy from Gaza and I was like, no I can’t be blond for that! But I took a lot of photos, and when Gangsters I said [season 2 lead director] Corin Hardy if I go bald or blond, because I have to be very different physically. When they saw the bald guy earlier in the show, I sent him a bunch of blonde photos and he really liked it. This information did not make sense, because Koba is like this new fish in this very big pond, like a child in a candy store when he arrives in London thinking that he owns the city, but he is a person who denies it.
And Koba’s brown hair really feeds into her colorful wardrobe, which includes a cool-looking maroon outfit. Were you involved in this?
The tracksuits were already there, but I felt like the tracksuit look was something we’d seen in Eastern European gangs. And I said, look, Koba is making a lot of money, he’s got blond hair, and he’s new in London, he’s like a tourist… he should dress like he’s on vacation and enjoy every minute of it. There was a gold jacket with blue pants, and these Cobra sneakers. I took about three quarters of my wardrobe home – half of it for my wife to wear. But Koba is a guy who really tries to seduce you, so I wanted to show as much chest hair as possible. But there were months where it was really cold when we were shooting and I was like, God, I regret this!
Koba is described as Georgian, but to be honest I didn’t think he was ethnic. He seemed international and could have come from any number of different places.
That’s the way they react, because when I look at Georgian, they say it’s always wrong as Israeli, Russian or Turkish. And it’s really kind of a mix.
In fact, when I booked it, they said, because I am Palestinian myself, I can make him Palestinian. I have played bad Arabs in many things in my career, but I wanted to have fun with this and not have any cultural responsibility, and I just wanted to be an artist. So because I had never done an accent before, I got really precise and got a Georgian in London to record my conversation. And there was this mispronunciation of words and emphasis in the wrong places. I really enjoyed the cadence and the rhythm.
Koba isn’t the biggest or strongest person himself, but he has this absolutely terrifying presence, like you can’t predict what he’s going to do next and can comment at a moment’s notice. He reminded me a bit of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Have you had any inspiration for yourself from other screen characters?
I was a big fan of Christoph Waltz Inglourious Basterds and remember to think that the character himself enjoyed what he was doing in terms of its evil and psychological manipulation. And I felt that Christoph Waltz enjoyed the work he had to do. To me, that was a lot like me and Koba. I’m always more interested in psychologically tortured characters, to me that’s scary.
After the first season of Gangsters came out, many people immediately associated Ṣọpẹ Dṛisu with the role of James Bond and said that he would be perfect to replace Daniel Craig. Now that you have worked with him, what do you think?
In full. And he is an incredible person as well, very, very disciplined. He is a good player and I think he will go very far. He played American Football and has boxing experience, and those types of things really help players. It becomes instinctive and just boosts all your responses. He is also a very meditative person. Between setting up and taking down, he doesn’t chat. He is someone you will see in the corner with his eyes closed. And I like to do the same thing myself, and I feel like I have reasons. So every time we played together I felt like we connected on a deep level.
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